rtfm or how i spent my sunday evening

dreading the impending move (or rather using it as an excuse to perform many long-overdue housekeeping tasks), i have been virtualizing various OS’es around the house (note how conveniently that eclipsed tasks like getting rid of old furniture or boxing things up - truly, one is always tempted to view everything to a technical problem).

first of all, note that there is a handy dandy jolly tool from vmware: vmware converter; it will happily virtualize your windows machine (no more screwing around with ghost/acronis/dd, like i used to).

still, i had a gentoo server confined within a wheezing old machine that absolutely had to stay up (so no cold restores). casting a nostalgic glance in the direction of dd/netcat combo, i opted for partimage and SysRescCD, but before that - dd if=/dev/hda of=hda-mbr-full bs=512 count=1 to save mbr; and to restore: dd if=hda-mbr-full of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1; then sfdisk -d \> file then sfdisk \< file (nifty! i did not know that). boot from the rescue cd, create partitions, restore partimage droppings (had to do it several times, apparently it is no smarter than dd - no checksums!), mkswap, etc, etc.

so far so good, but the main reason for this post is the mysterious vmware-modules - i tried emergeing them, tried downloading them, read up on forums, installed client api/sdk available from the download sites, even read the docs! basically, being a gentoo user, i did not have generic drivers for my network card; once transplanted to vmware, the OS refused to acknowledge network hardware. vmware-modules were referred to as the ultimate answer.

finally, somewhere in the depths of google cache i found the answer - drop-down VM menu, then select “Install VMWare tools…” followed by mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/tmp gives you the ultimate joy - a vmware-tools tarball. man, how is that not obvious?!! under windows this runs an installer, but under linux it quietly slips in an iso under the guise of /dev/cdrom

now it’s just typing and joyous cargo-culting:

run the installer script, build the kernel modules, check’em with lsmod, symlink net.eth0 to network (boy, do i feel dirty), play some more tricks to appease the gentoo startup script gods and vmware reliance on redhat-like rc, and voila - vmware starts before net\*, eth0 pops up in ifconfig after you tweaked /etc/conf.d/net, (do not forget to go under Host -> Virtual Network Settings -> Automatic Bridging and add all the crap like VPN pseudo-adapters, otherwise it will get you, like it gets me every time; then set vmnet0 as the auto-bridged interface to be used for vm).

phew! now i pick up a bottle of red and promptly forget all this nonsense.