Diary of a Network Geek

Oh, this is cool.

Okay, so I’ve been doing a lot of work on Linux lately. Not only for the bootable ZENWorks imaging system, but just plain Linux stuff.
Last week, I set up a Red Hat AS2.1 machine for use as an FTP server, but, just as I was starting this for the folks who need it inhouse, they start talking about needing a Windows 2000 server to run some specialized print server for eMatrix, which is what the FTP server was for. So, my boss suggests that we use VMWare for Linux. Brilliant! Of course, most people are running VMWare on a Win32 machine and emulating Linux, but we think outside the box. No problem, I get it all installed and running, though the first time I ran the VMWare PERL script that set up the program, it failed. No reason for it to fail, as far as I could tell, because it ran the second time. Great, so I get it all installed an running and let the boss know. Then, he asks me, so what are we going to manage this machine with? Er…. VNC, I guess.
Right, so I get that setup on the Windows machine in VMWare without a hitch. Getting it installed on Red Hat wasn’t a problem, but getting it running…. Well, thankfully, I finally figured out that the Real VNC website has the answer on a page called Native X display Support. The only thing is I need to edit XF86Config-4 instead of XF86Config. No problem! Now the VNC server autostarts. And the boss asks me if I can get the VMWare session to automatically launch at reboot. Er…. Well, I can see what Google turns up!
What I eventually came up with was a shell script I called “xvmstart” that was as follows:

#!/bin/sh
# Written by JKH on 10-13-04
. /usr/bin/vmware -x /vmcfg/Windows2000Server/Windows2000Server.vmx

(Where vmcfg is where you stored your configurations for the virtual machines. Oh, and if the last line wraps around, that should be a three line script.)
I saved that file in /root/.kde/Autostart and rebooted. As soon as I logged in, BAM! VMWare loaded like a charm. So, now, I had to make this badboy autologin… Er, back to Google.
I finally found a forum that told me I had to edit /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc to set AutoLoginEnable=true and AutoLoginUser=skippy (or, whatever you want to autologin as). KerPlow! A fully automated solution brought to you by Linux, Google, VMWare, VNC, and me, the Network Geek.

I love my job!

Okay, this probably isn’t big news anymore.

But, it was Friday when I read it. See, I usually queue up posts a day or two in advance, so I’m just a little behind. Still, I saw this article on Ping, which is AustralianIT’s newsletter, so I may have the jump on folks here in the States. It’s interesting to me because the things they talked about in the article were the Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate management system. In other words, LDAP. Hmm, that sounds familiar. Oh, yeah, it’s what Novell has been using for, oh, about five years or so. Looks like there might be some competition in the OpenSource-based network architecture product space over the next couple of years. I hope Novell pays attentiont to this and gets their shit together before Red Hat has a product to market. Novell really needs to maintain their slice of the networking pie. No, scratch that, they need to get working on a bigger slice.
In any case, the deal is expected to go in the third quarter of the 2004 financial year, so they’ve got a bit of time. Not much, though. I can’t imagine RedHat waiting too long before getting something out there.
I wonder what MicroSoft thinks about all this?

Hmm, Linux just seems to be in the news…

So, what am I going to do, ignore it? Of course not!
Well, this is a little old, but this article on Australian IT talks about Red Hat releasing a version of Linux meant for the desktop. Hunh? I mean, hasn’t that been around for a long time? Well, I guess not according to Red Hat. Anyway, if they can get the installer to be simple enough for my mother to use, they’ll have something. Until then, though, it’s still a tool for us geeks.
Still, it’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out.