Recently I have the chance to create a Fedora 9 virtual machine on VMware server. This is to replace a crashed server that ran out of disk space. Since it was running off a Compaq ML server. I thought this is an excellent opportunity to remove the hardware element by converting it to a virtual server.
Overall, it was a most interesting experience for a Windows geek. Mundane things that are taken for granted requires lots of typing in the Linux world. In the end, it still might not work.
After installing the server, I tried installing VMware Tools. Simple stuff like mounting the CD and install the RPM. Oops forgot I need to run the vmtools-config.pl.
Never mind, just run it and the installer complained that the drivers is not compatible with my kernel. Do I want to recompile? Where is my gcc? Oops no gcc, so installed that. Where is my kernel source C headers? Can’t find it anywhere on the Net or on yum. Strange. Re-run and choose no instead. Config vmtools to run as a service. Next.
Need to move the user home folders off the root partition or they might kill the server. Which they successfully did on the old server. Turn off the VM and add harddisks. Now how to add the new disks. Mount and dmesg gave a lot of info but nothing to go forward. Google tells me that each disk is labeled sda, sdb etc. I have to create a partition using fdisk and format it. Thereafter the new partition can be mounted which is now /dev/sdb1.
The original crashed server was running some scripts to send stuff around and perform regular disk housekeeping.
Time for crontab to do its magic. Placed the scripts in /usr/local for simple retrieval. Create a file in cron.d to do the scheduling. Strangely crond kept logging in /var/log/cron that there is a bad command in my schedule file. After reading the last part of crontab(5), it appears that I need to put the username in each line in between the time and the command. This is because cron.d is a system-wide cron job.
Hey presto, it is now working! Now to create that 800+ users.
The links are here:
VMware tools, dmesg,
How to add a new disk in Linux VM
crontab(5)