lifebsideben

I got a new MacBook, and bought VMWare Fusion, so I could… well, I’m not exactly sure what I planned to do with it, but since I have no other machine in my house that runs Windows, I guess I thought I’d use it for that occasional windows app (PowerISO for example) or to test prince.org through the eyes of IE7. Well, I installed XP into it and that was just dandy, it really knows exactly how to handle hosting Windows, great vmware tools integration, the whole shebang, flawless.

More interestingly, I thought I’d install an Ubuntu instance, and maybe retire the big honking RAID5 Ubuntu server machine, and save the corresponding energy usage, etc. I mostly use it for mysql slave backups of prince.org, and some minor code development (it used to also host my music and photo libraries on the raid disks, but I’ve since moved that to an external drive on the MacBook with TimeMachine on a different device, providing the redundancy.)

Sounds well and good, and vmware also “understands” Ubuntu, but uh, not nearly as smoothly as Windows… the whole vmware tools setup is, while not painful, certainly not “one-click”. But, it works. Well, I thought it did–my networking was hosed. I futzed with it a bit thinking it was their special vmxnet drivers/devices, and then realized my host OSes networking was not working, either. Since I connect via 802.11n, and it’s sometimes flaky (hard to know if it’s Leopard or the wonky apple gigabit router), I turned airport off and then back on and it came back in the host… but Ubuntu was still not happy. If I reboot Ubuntu, it takes out the host networking again… hmmm. Try swithing to bridged mode instead of shared… same thing. Hmmmmmm…. a head-scratcher.

Finally, I hit upon the root cause… I bet the router isn’t happy with my “lock this IP to this specific MAC address”, when there are 2 OSes both sending packets, on that MAC! Yep, that was it. I removed the settings in the Airport itself that caused it to always hand out a specific IP via DHCP to a specific MAC, and assigned IPs manually to the MacBook and Ubuntu, and all was well. Yay. I’m still not sure what magic was going on to make networking in Windows work, but no worries.

I actually wonder if I were to use the “DHCP client ID” instead of the MAC address, if it’d work that way… I just don’t know where to set that in Ubuntu… something to try another day!

Tags: apple, debugging, mac, software, ubuntu, vmware

Well, I finally got VNC working again after it lost its mind during the 7.04 upgrade, although with a different binary. Still not sure what’s up with tightvnc, but at this point I guess I don’t care to solve the root cause. Based on this Ubuntu bug report thread, I tried the RealVNC server build, called vnc4server. A simple sudo apt-get install vnc4server and tweaks to my start/stop scripts, and I was in business again. Whew!

Even better, I got some added functionality that is really helpful! The vnc4server package includes a ‘vnc4config’ app that, while running, allows clipboard data to be passed back and forth between the host and client. It works, and it’s nifty. I was trying to figure out how to start that up in my xstartup (it ends with “exec gnome-session” so lots of luck there) but it turns out the gnome session itself, can help. You can specify startup programs at System -> Preferences -> Sessions. Seems reasonable. It’ll probably start up when I’m at console as well, but should be harmless, I’d expect (will test that next time I actually need to use the console.)

Tags: linux, ubuntu, vnc