The Certified Geek

This is just a reposting of the activities I had done to install VMware Server Beta (Build-22874) on a Debian Server with Kernel built for 64bit. Kudos! to Robinz for the great blog.

Since VMWare Server is a 32bit program and the Linux server uses a 64bit kernel, some additional libraries are needed to be installed on the box particularly ia32-libs. This basically removes the pains of these output when running vmware-config.pl script. These where the output before:

The correct version of one or more libraries needed to run VMware Server may be
missing. This is the output of ldd /usr/bin/vmware:
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libm.so.6 => /lib32/libm.so.6 (0xf7efb000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib32/libdl.so.2 (0xf7ef7000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib32/libpthread.so.0 (0xf7ee5000)
libX11.so.6 => not found
libXtst.so.6 => not found
libXext.so.6 => not found
libXt.so.6 => not found
libICE.so.6 => not found
libSM.so.6 => not found
libXrender.so.1 => not found
libz.so.1 => not found
libc.so.6 => /lib32/libc.so.6 (0xf7db4000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7f26000)

So by just running an apt-get (or even dselect)
apt-get install ia32-libs
These will be gone in a jippy.

Now the next step is to install the Management User Interface for the VMWare Server with provides a Web Interface in managing the virtual machines. However, this will results in some errors such as missing libdb.so which will not install the program properly. So you need to get the 32bit version of libdb even if the ldconfig -v shows it. Its because these are 64bit libraries. Even after this leg, the authentication module with the MUI will not synchronize with the system unless 32bit PAM libraries are correctly installed and referred. (With permission from Robinz), here are the libraries needed to be downloaded and installed:

# wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/p/pam/libpam0g_0.76-22_i386.deb
# dpkg -x libpam0g_0.76-22_i386.deb /emul/ia32-linux/
# wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/db2/libdb2_2.7.7.0-9_i386.deb
# dpkg -x libdb2_2.7.7.0-9_i386.deb /emul/ia32-linux/
# wget http://blog.robinz.info/wp-content/uploads/2006/ia32-security.tar.bz2
# tar xvjf ia32-security.tar.bz2 /emul/ia32-linux/lib/security/


The first files eliminates the problem in running vmware-config-mui.pl script particularly this output

Couldn't find necessary components on your system. It appears that you are
missing the following library: libdb.so.3

The last two files are for the problem encountered when logging into the MUI Web interface which still need to edit /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd file to refer the PAM libraries to the correct location.

# more /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd
auth sufficient /emul/ia32-linux/lib/security/pam_unix2.so shadow nullok
auth required /emul/ia32-linux/lib/security/pam_unix_auth.so shadow nullok
account sufficient /emul/ia32-linux/lib/security/pam_unix2.so
account required /emul/ia32-linux/lib/security/pam_unix_acct.so

And to refresh everything, restart all vmware services:

etc/init.d/vmware restart
etc/init.d/httpd.vmware restart

And lastly, connect to the VMWare Management Web Interface via https://hostname:8333/ and use the systems administrative account.

Enjoy your VMWare Server!