Fixing vmkernel symlinks
Posted on Wednesday, 30th July, 2008 in Life
Since I do happen to be in the situation pretty often where the kernel inside a VM is newer than what VMware currently has in their tools (as in the SUSE kernel is newer than the binary modules built by VMware), here’s a quick reminder for myself on how to to fix the .ko symlinks.
1 2 3 4 5 | for file in /lib/modules/$( uname -r )/misc/*.ko ; \ do rm $file && \ ln -s /lib/modules/$( uname -r )/misc/${file/.ko/.o} $file \ done |
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on VMware ESX (continued)
Posted on Sunday, 27th July, 2008 in Life
Well, after some searching today (we applied the VMware Update 2 today, thus the VMware Tools update too), I finally found out what is causing that problem.
Though the problem seems to be not limited to virtual systems alone, I just browsed through this Novell Forum thread which pretty much describes my problem. I found the same error in the VM’s I tried to mount a CD image.
kernel: ide-cd: weird block size 524288
kernel: ide-cd: default to 2kb block size
Only difference between my behaviour and the one described, is that the virtual maschine is switched off immediately after you try to mount a CD image.
Now, this guy is saying Novell is working on it … But you’re gonna have to ask the question, why in gods name did such an update get through QA ? Or ain’t there no QA for updates ? *shrug*
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on VMware ESX
Posted on Tuesday, 22nd July, 2008 in Life
We’re currently having a *really* weird problem with our VM’s. Sometime last week, SUSE released a kernel update. Now, once you install it and you reboot the selected VM with a DVD/CD image present, you’re gonna see this:
msg.vmxaiomgr.retrycontabort.unkown
The only workaround so far has been to unmount *any* cleanse any CD-Drives attached to the VM. And yes, this is reproduceable, even reinstalling from scratch doesn’t change the fact, that after installing the patch the VM quits working.
I also know, SLES10 SP2 ain’t officially supported yet by VMware, but I’d still suspect it to just work and not produce such weird errors. The only thing I found so far is this VMTN thread ..
Lucky us, VMware just today released Update 2 for VirtualCenter and ESX, wherein SLES10SP2 should be officially supported!