I cloned an Ubuntu 7.04 VMWare Workstation 6.0 virtual machine, and found that the cloned VM booted without network access. dmesg | grep eth0 showed that the pcnet32 driver was loaded fine and detected eth0, but ifconfig doesn’t list eth0, and ifconfig -a lists eth1 which is down. WTF?

I decided to use the long weekend to break in VMWare Server RC2. As per the release notes, I uninstalled GSX Server and rebooted prior to installing VMWare Server.

Impressively, it didn’t require another reboot, and appears to be fully compatible with my old VMs.

According to the admin guide, in order to take advantage of the new features in Server, you have to upgrade the virtual machines. This changes some of the virtual hardware, so may have some implications for the behavior of the guest OSs.

A few weeks ago my father pointed out that the date stamps on my blog posts were behind by a week. Upon investigation, I found that bonzo’s clock was a week behind. I updated it and declared victory.

Then, he pointed it out again a few days ago. Sure enough, it had slipped by several days. When I logged into the VMWare Console to check for options to sync the clock or whatever, I noticed a repeated error from the FreeBSD kernel that I’ve been getting on bonzo forever and always ignored:

calcru: runtime went backwards from [some big number] usec to [another] usec for pid [pid]

When I first created bonzo, I allocated 96MB of RAM in VMWare. As I ran Gallery 2, Drupal, ByteHoard, etc, it became clear from the out-of-memory errors that I needed to boost the memory space. I since increased the allocation to 256MB, but the swap file is still only 160MB. Consequently, I’m plagued by kernel out of space space errors like:

Dec  5 18:09:18 bonzo kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(6): failed

and

Dec  6 03:03:07 bonzo kernel: swap_pager: out of swap space
Dec  6 03:03:07 bonzo kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(4): failed
Dec  6 03:03:07 bonzo kernel: pid 15958 (httpd), uid 80, was killed: out of swap space

I need to grow the download disk on hotsoup-p2p, a VMWare Workstation virtual disk that stores my P2P downloads while they’re in progress. It’s only 10GB; I need at least 20GB, probably more.

From this forum posting, I see there’s a utility installed in the VMWare Workstation directory, vmware-vdiskmanager.exe. Running it I get:

Usage: vmware-vdiskmanager.exe OPTIONS diskName | drive-letter:
Offline disk manipulation utility
 Options:
    -c                   : create disk; need to specify other create options

I just got an email from VMWare announcing the new "VMWare Player":http://www.vmware.com/download/player. As the name implies, it allows anyone who downloads the free player to run virtual machines created w/ VMWare Workstation.