Long Term Storage

I have this fantastic server which redirects console output to its serial port and I wanted to take advantage of it.  I went through the process of setting up inittab and grub to work and then I started testing the configuration.  In Windows using Putty, everything worked fine.  As soon as I moved the cable over to the serial port of an OSSIM box, I kept getting this error.

/dev/ttyS0 is not a tty

Googl’ing around returned nothing helpful which is why I am posting this here.

I have a habit of  disabling unused peripherals when I setup a new box.  Since I rarely use Serial Ports, I disable them.  Well.. that was the problem.  The disabled serial port isn’t going to work very well for a serial connection.

Hope this saves someone some time.

Apparently Dell’s TPM VT Trusted Execution is incompatible with 64bit virtual guests.  You must go into the BIOS and disable the VT Trusted Execution in the virtualization settings to get it to work.  Alternative is to disable TPM since it is highly unlikely you are using it anyway. (DISCLAIMER:  Be sure your corporate WDE does rely on it.)  If you go this route, you must actually POWER OFF for the changes to take effect.

I have a Ubuntu 8.10 AMD64 Server.  In the syslog, I was getting the following error every few minutes.

console-kit-daemon[5013]: CRITICAL: cannot initialize libpolkit

The error is triggered by the update-modt cron job which runs ever 10 minutes.

This is a bug in Intrepid.  console-kit-daemon requires PolicyKit as a dependancy, but Intrepid (Server AMD64) does not install it when it installs console-daemon-kit.

The simple fix is to install policykit.

sudo apt-get install policykit

Next run of the update-motd job and the error is gone.

After 20 minutes of searching the history files, I finally found the posting I was looking for.

It is the instructions on how to complile vmware-tools when they won’t due to kernel updates.

Install the needed packages.
sudo apt-get install build-essential xinetd linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev xorg-dev libgtk2.0-dev (Only need if using X)

Change to /tmp to do the install.
cd /tmp

Browse over to the SourceForge Open VM Tools project page and grab the link to download the latest version.

Which as of 8/6/2008 is http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.07.01-102166.tar.gz

Grab a copy.
wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.07.01-102166.tar.gz

Grab a copy of the vmware tools.

Untar/gzip them.
tar xzvf VMware*.gz
tar xzvf open-vm-tools*.gz

Build some modules.
cd open-vm-tools-2008.07.01-102166/
./configure && make
cd modules/linux/

Tar them up.
for i in *; do mv ${i} ${i}-only; tar -cf ${i}.tar ${i}-only; done

Copy them over the included modules.
cp -f *.tar /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/

CD into the VMWare tools dir and run the install.
cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl