I've been neglecting my VMware server, not out of boredom, but out of disk space. Literally. I didn't have enough disk to run a proper VMware server. So, I went and found a nice deal at NewEgg, a Western Digital 250GB drive SATA for only $85. The disk arrived last week and I installed it. Then I confronted my aged VMware beta install. That's where the fun began.

I did an emerge --sync && emerge -uDav world && dispatch-conf, stopped the current VMware server, uninstalled the old version (the VMware overlay for Gentoo isn't done with proper Portage revisioning), and updated my working copy of the Subversion repository at
http://callisto.cs.kun.nl:81/svn/trees/vmware/app-emulation.

The revision number came out at 53, and I promptly had emerge errors that complained about broken VMware ebuilds.

Doing a little Googling, I came across some good sites (see the end of this post). Apparently the Gentoo Overlays are becoming official projects and have centralized Subversion repositories now. Cool! My only problem became a little one. WHERE THE HECK WERE THE REPOSITORIES??

I couldn't find any docs, either on the Gentoo Overlays site, or on gentoo-wiki.org. However, a polite email to overlays@gentoo.org gave me my answer:
http://overlays.gentoo.org/svn/proj/vmware/trunk/app-emulation.

The latest revision from there was 64, which works like a champ. So, if you're stuck like I was, just go get the latest revision from that repository, and you should be all set.

Links
* http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Installing_3rd_Party_Ebuilds
* http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Overlays
* http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/vmware/timeline

It's been a long while in coming, but I finally got VMware working on Gentoo AMD64. I've posted the details of the problems I encountered, as well as the solutions I found here

I just finished rebuilding my firewall. What a crappy way to spend an evening.

Today when I got home, my network was in a general state of screwed up. Two of my four towers were cold, and the firewall was completely fubar'd. It wouldn' mount anything other than /dev/hda3. What was totally strange about it was that it claimed /dev/hda didn't exist...although it did mount /dev/hda3.

I think my firewall problem was due to the fact that I did an emerge -uDav world on the weekend. The disk was physically fine, but the OS was totally hosed. In any case, I wasn't about to trouble-shoot so intricate an issue, particularly when the server that was down was the heart of my network. I did manage to save my iptables config files by booting to a Gentoo LiveCD copy I had lying around and scp'ing the tarball of my few config files off to another server.

So, I failed back to my old FreeBSD firewall, which had been sitting cold, ripped out the little 3GB Seagate hard-drive I'd been running on, and installed a 6GB Western Digital. I then added some more RAM and a second quad-ethernet card, and set about installing Debian.

The Debian install was a breeze, as is to be expected. The only hassle I had was the MAC cache on my cable modem, but Comcast explained that a simple reboot would flush that right out. 30 seconds later and my Debian box was sucking down dpkg files and installing.

I manually configured the file system, that was no big deal. Fortunately enough, the default kernel came with iptables installed, so I didn't have to recompile the kernel (that would have taken a while!). At the end of the Debian installer, I chose the following packages to set up the standard-issue basic home-router:
* dhcp-client
* dnsmasq
* snort
* ntop

To be honest, however, I had forgotten to install dhcp-client, installing the server instead. That too was no problem, however. I was able to set the old firewall as the new firewall's default router, just to download the package. After I had installed that, everything pretty much fell into place.

That's the first time that a Gentoo system ever crapped out on an emerge world for me. Rather disappointing, but at this point it leaves just my AMD64 box as the last Gentoo system standing. It's probably just as well, this last cycle of emerge world on the old PII I'm using for a firewall took over a day.

This evening I made a purchase that is perhaps long overdue. I bought a relatively inexpensive AMD64 motherboard and accompanying 2GHz processor, along with 1 Gig of DDR RAM. This will be the most powerful server I've put in my cabinets yet.

There are several reasons for buying this. One, I just bought an ATX mid-tower case for an old Athlon my parents gave me. Unfortunately, the board is quite toast, and I don't feel like exerting any effort to fix it, since it's so old. Secondly, Tiger Direct had a couple of good sales going on. I bough the whole kit for less than $200 (after rebates).

Thirdly, with VMware making their GSX server free, I realized that a powerful box to host a virtual suite of machines would be far more economical in the long-run, not only in terms of electricity consumed, but also in terms of time spent playing sysadmin.

I've worked with VMware Workstation for years, but now that their server product is available gratis, it really expands the possibilities and the potential. Virtual machines running resident on a server open up all kinds of possibilities for black-hat tool and malware testing and research, for honeypots, for playing with different (x86 architecture) operating systems, for virtual networks of servers to play different roles like mail server and so forth, and just for standing up special boxes on short notice or general geek play.

This will be my first foray into a 64-bit system at home. At work, I've been dealing with 64-bit for some time of course, but I've never owned a 64-bit system. The idea of making that transition is quite exciting. Upgrading architecture platforms is one of those rare moments for a geek. Clock speed increases on chips happen all the time, but to move to the next level on the overall chip architecture is a rarity indeed. The last time I made the jump, from 16 bit to 32 bit, I had never heard of Linux, and everyone was running Windows 3.11.

Naturally, I did my research for Linux support. My first inclination was Debian, since I've recently switched to it from Gentoo as my Linux distro of choice. Sadly, however, Debian does not have strong native AMD64 support. So, my second choice was Gentoo, which has robust AMD64 support.

Even before I had found that Debian didn't have good AMD64 support, I was thinking Gentoo might be what I want on this new system. After all, optimizing for the particular hardware platform it's running on is what Gentoo is great at. With such a powerful system, the compile time for software packages should be minimal, and the potential gain of a well-tuned system will pay back the effort, particularly if I'm going to stuff it full of virtual systems - every bit will count.

Having said all that, I'm going to make Gentoo my distro for this new mighty server I'll be building. For all the other hardware servers, I'll continue with Debian. It would probably be feasible to make Debian my distro of choice for the VM Linux systems I'll build, in fact.

So, having done my research and made the purchase, there's little left now but to eagerly await the arrival of my new kit. With any luck, I'll get to build it this weekend, or maybe early next week.

On the topic of Linux distribution debates...