BOLVERK - Tim's Lousy Blog » Linux

Certification

Tim Oudin — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 04:41:53 +0000

I’m not generally the certification chasing type but I’ve needed a VCP to keep my career going the way I want it to. I’ve also been attempting to gain more enterprise Linux experience. I’ve decided to do some Red Hat training courses and take the exams. I’ve succeed in passing both RHCT and RHCE exams! I have Red Hat Certified Engineer number 805008649833712 on RHEL 5.

Debian Software RAID

Tim Oudin — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 15:29:56 +0000

I just finished setting up a machine with a pair of SATA disks using an onboard Promise controller on Debian Sarge. Steps to configure this follow.

Installed disks but do not define a RAID in the controllers bios
Boot Debian Sarge installer disk, loading 2.6 kernel via linux26 command
Partition creation
- Manually edit partition table
- Create one partition on each disk for sway, I did not add these to the RAID so this can be defined as swap. The sum total will be available to the OS
- Create one partition for /boot, define as RAID.
- Create one (or more) partition(s) to fill the remainder of the disk, define as RAID
Create RAID md devices
- Create a md device for /boot partitions
- Format with filesystem of choice
- Mount as /boot
- Set bootable flag
Create additional md devices with remaining partitions
- Having only one partition to deal with I formatted ext3 and defined a mount point of /
Continue with installation after writing the partition table to disk

I prefer to run testing as I’ve only twice had issues and only one of those was fatal. Had my Linux skills been better at the time I might have been able to recover but that was many years ago. After the initial reboot I start to answer questions and cancel out of one. This will provide the installer menu which will allow me to select multiple APT repositories. After selecting the repositories I’ll skip past the software selection screen to just give a bare bones installation. At this point the /etc/apt/sources.list file can be edited for the distribution of choice, apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade and away ya go.

VMware Tools on Fedora Core 5

Tim Oudin — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:28:29 +0000

As it seems to be usual with Fedora, doing anything with vmware was not completely smooth. Here’s what I found needed to be done to my stock installation of Fedora Core 5. I’m assuming some Linux mojo as I’d think one would have to have some to have the aspiration to do this… Yell if I’m incorrect.

First, install gcc

yum install gcc

Install kernel header files

yum install kernel-devel

Check it matches the running kernel

uname -r; rpm -q kernel-devel

If the two do not match, upgrade and reboot

yum -y upgrade kernel kernel-devel

Locate the kernel headers

echo /usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)-$(uname -p)/include

Select ‘Install VMWare Tools’ from the console. Mount the virtual CDROM if it’s not automounted. Copy VMware Tools from the mount

cp /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-5.5.1-19175.tar.gz /tmp/

Unpack VMware Tools to a temporary directory

cd /tmp/

tar zxvf VMwareTools-5.5.1-19175.tar.gz

cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/

./vmware-install.pl

When prompted with “Do you want to run vmware-config-tools.pl?”, answer no. Backup the original vmware-config-tools.pl

cp /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl.org

Get a patch for VMware Tools

cd /tmp/ wget http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/vmware-tools-any-update2.tar.gz

tar zxvf vmware-tools-any-update2.tar.gz

cd vmware-tools-any-update2/

./runme.pl

Again, when prompted “Do you want to run vmware-config-tools.pl?”, answer yes.

Create a symlink to the VMware mouse driver

ln -s /usr/lib/vmware-tools/configurator/XOrg/6.8.x/vmmouse_drv.o /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/

Change xorg mouse setting

vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Change “mouse” to “vmmouse” in Section “InputDevice” if necessary
Done, restart X