USENIX SysAdmin

I’ve spent my day wrestling with VMWare Server 2.0. We have a bunch of oddball machines running FooOS 2.hopelesslyoutofdate mainly because our aged database software won’t run on anything newer. I’d like those boxes to live on in their own little virtual worlds on our shiny new servers. VMWare is the panacea that will save us from high electric bills to massive system failure so I downloaded Server Version 2, read the pdf, and started the install. That went more or less okay. Configuration was a bit painful at first as I tried to get the web interface to use LDAP, but eventually I gave up and set up a local user account. After all, this is a proof-of-concept install and I don’t need to get bogged down in details. I also had fun learning that if there is a personal cert in your web browser the vmware interface will ask to use it. I had one for some reason that was long expired. A quick trip to thawte fixed that more or less; firefox still asks if it is okay to use the cert multiple times, but I dutifully click ‘okay’.

Now the real fun was mostly courtesy of my increasingly strict spam filters. They don’t like email from vmware, not one bit, and they like email from ‘e25.com’ even less. After trying to whitelist their servers and senders for a few hours I managed to dig out the log of the blocked message that included my trial serial number. It would have been much more helpful if the content of that email wasn’t sent base64 multipart text and html which is unreadable as plain text unless your name is Bruce Schneier (appearing live at LISA ‘08 register now). Fine. Copy, paste into online base64 decoder, grab the URL to verify my email address.

Dandy. Now the web interface works in firefox, the serial number is verified and installed, and I’ve created a test vm. Now to install. VMWare server 2 has a handy built in remote console as part of the web interface that installs as an add-on to firefox. Great! But, it won’t install with the ever so helpful:

firefox could not install the file at https://sns.usenix.org/foo/foo
because: not a valid install package -207

Okay. scp vmware-vmrc-linux-x86.xpi to my desktop and install. That seems to work; firefox doesn’t complain anyway and restarts happily. Only, it doesn’t work. VMWare’s web interface pretends there is no add-on installed and tries to install again with the same error. Looking at the file name of the xpi files, it probably is the case that one needs a vmware-vmrc-osx-ppc.xpi for my ancient 3 year old PowerBook G4.

Google. Google. Google. Google!!! Nothing helpful other than other people complaining about lack of OS X support or describing VNC workarounds for ealier verions of VMWare. Fine. yum install firefox on shiny new server. ssh -X -Y sns xterm.

xterm Xt error: Can't open display

Try setting DISPLAY variable like a stupid-head.  Check sshd_config - fine. Google. Google. Seriously?!

sudo yum install xorg-x11-xauth.x86_64

Great. I have an xterm with a DISPLAY variable. Virtual Love must be seconds away. firefox &

Fonts. Firefox shows up on my screen, but menu text is illegible and page body text doesn’t show. I can select what is there and copy’n'paste to see the text, but that is NOT helpful.

I don’t give up easily. I like my computing experience to be difficult. I liked OS/2. But really, VMWare, did you need to get rid of the VNC solution in favor of a web browser plugin? I realize this is my fault for using OS X on a PowerPC, some miniscule portion of your market share that probably doesn’t even rate an “other” slice on the pie chart. And I know that I’m a fool for having spam filters that reject email that looks like email that other people have seen a lot of, but please try sending mail from something.vmware.com so I can whitelist it. ‘foo.e25.com’ bears no resemblance to it.

I guess I wrestle with installing X11 fonts on the PowerBook tomorrow. It will give me a fine opportunity to complain about macports not having binaries while I’m watching the PowerBook compile.

Just back from USENIX ‘08 in Boston. The conference went very well from a networking perspective. We had plenty of bandwidth and hardware to cover demand. The Xirrus Arrays donated to us again were extremely useful in serving our larger rooms. I finally got around to figuring out how to pull association data from them and stuff it into rrd. Here’s a graph of the array serving the refereed papers track:

Each color represents a radio; the array has 16 radios - 4 A/B/G and 12 A only. The thing that I was most surprised by is the number of associations to the 802.11A only radios. We have an SSID assigned the A radios that is separate from the A/B/G radios, so it is easy for attendees to pick the A frequencies.

NSDI ‘07 is over and I have pretty graphs to share. The most interesting thing about this conference network is that our uplink was a pair of channel bonded T1s that we went through considerable effort to arrange. The connection was completed and functional the Friday before the conference started, and worked fine on Monday, but sometime between Monday evening and Tuesday morning one of the T1s failed. I figured that out mid-afternoon on Tuesday as my ssh sessions became usless. It turns out the hotel’s ISP had a bad card on their end. They remedied the problem Thursday morning. Most of Wednesday was pretty painful as a result.

I’ve also included our AP association graphs. NSDI had a lot of network use by non-attendees. I think we’re going to have to finally start using an authentication system.