Adventures in F,O, X, & 0

Just doing this a few times today: VMware Tools into Ubuntu From the VMware menu in VCentre, choose VM->Install VMware Tools. This makes the tools installed appear as a CDROM drive, but this now needs to be mounted, and the installer run. On Ubuntu it's also necessary to compile the tools from source - and so we need to first install compilers etc that are not normally needed. The script below does all of this. Open an editor ( nano or vim ), to create a file called vm-tools , paste the contents in, save and then run the chmod command to make the script executable:     cd      (changes to your home directory)     nano vm-tools (paste and save)     chmod +x vm-tools and now run the script:     ./vm-tools You'll be asked for your password initially - and can safely use the defaults for all prompts. This is the script: # ## vmti - VMware Tools Installer # echo -e "\n## Installing build-essential etc...\n" sudo apt-get install bu

Hmm, a Big Important Server was restarted by a client overnight - and never came back up. Opps! These days of course, everything's virtual, so from the console I could see the problem - a "panic". Downloading a SystemRescueCd ISO and booting from that went smoothly, but sorting it fully out got me back into "chroot" - which I find fun. Less fun was the complexity of GRUB2 - seems I haven't played with grub for a while because this is a different beast than I remember. Oh, and the main disk is LVM, which caused me some headache too. Cause? Unclear, but lots of old kernels clogging up /boot was a BIG factor! Now re-thinking my automated-upgrades strategy)