random neuron misfires

One of my machines in my production homelab is an ESXi server, a long-toothed upgrade from the 5.x days. I keep a lot of legacy VMs and copies of every version of Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, Debian, CentOS and hundreds of other VMs on it. It’s invaluable to be able to spin up a test machine […]

This was a bugger to find out, and required installing and reinstalling Linux a dozen times in different ways, to narrow down on the actual cause. If you run VMware Workstation on your Linux host, and are also trying to run Linux guests, you may run into a situation where your mouse cursor in the […]

This took me awhile to piece together, and I had to go direct to the maintainers of several of these components to get clarity on why some things worked, while others did not, even following the explicit instructions. Here, I present the 100% working HOWTO: I started with a post I found written by someone […]

It may seem odd, that it’s almost 2015, and I’m writing a post describing how to install VMware Tools inside Ubuntu 5.04, a Linux distribution that was released on April 8th, 2005 and went End of Life on October 31, 2006. I run a home lab here with a number of test machines (all VMs […]

If you’re anything like me, you take security seriously. With all the recent news about the NSA and Prism and over-reach of surveillance, you’ll take this very seriously. I run several layers of nested firewalls, VPNs and other layers of security at my office. One of the things I run in a virtualized environment (VMware […]

Another quick VMware Tools patch and fix if you’re using Linux Kernel 3.10 and 3.11.0 (and probably later, until this gets integrated into mainline). This time, if you’re seeing the following error: Using 2.6.x kernel build system. make: Entering directory `/tmp/modconfig-CZk9AS/vmmemctl-only’ /usr/bin/make -C /lib/modules/3.11.0-999-generic/build/include/.. SUBDIRS=$PWD SRCROOT=$PWD/. \ MODULEBUILDDIR= modules make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-3.11.0-999-generic’ CC [M] […]

If you run a current version of VMware Workstation, VMware Server, ESXi or VMware Fusion with a recent Linux kernel as a guest, you’ve most-likely run into this already. UPDATE: If you’re using Linux kernel 3.11.0, see my updated blog post for the patch and fix for that revision. Using 2.6.x kernel build system. make: […]

While playing with the recent FreeDOS 1.1 release (only 17 years in the making), I found a need to convert a VirtualBox appliance image to a VMware disk image, but the steps weren’t clear or straightforward. Here’s what I did, in a nutshell: First, install VirtualBox. You can grab the install from the main VirtualBox […]

If you’re like me, you probably use VMware Workstation (or VMware Player or VMware Fusion) quite a bit to test different aspects of other operating systems without having to break your host machine. I do development and testing on Linux, and need to ensure that the latest Linux distributions don’t break my code, or that […]

I’ve been using VMware Workstation for many, many years and I run a few hundred gigabytes of virtual machines for development and testing on various platforms. Some of these include physical machines that have been converted to virtual machines (using VMware Converter, which used to be called P2V [Physical 2 Virtual]) and some include purely […]