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I installed VMware Server on my Gentoo box this morning. Because it’s fairly new to the tree, and I’ve been wanting to try it out for while, and now it’s free. I had a couple simple issues too outlined below, but outside of that it works great.

The first task after the quick 100mb download, and emerge of a few missing dependancies was to add my user to the vmware group so that I will be able to use it.

If your VMware Server is located on another machine like myself, you will most likely need to also remember to add a few lines to your xinetd.conf. As it comes out of the box, it is only accessible to your local machine. You will need to modify your /etc/xinetd.conf/vmware-authd so that it contains;

only_from = xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/24

Otherwise your VMware Console client will hang and you will have this error in your syslog on the remote machine.

Aug 28 08:32:24 mywhiz xinetd[29408]: FAIL: vmware-authd address from=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Aug 28 08:32:24 mywhiz xinetd[12288]: START: vmware-authd pid=29408 from=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Aug 28 08:32:24 mywhiz xinetd[12288]: EXIT: vmware-authd status=0 pid=29408 duration=0(sec)

Soon after something else was in my way of VMware Server working. While running the console had no errors, the syslog on my remote machine had something.

Aug 28 09:44:09 mywhiz vmware-authd[32121]: The "/opt/vmware/server/lib/bin/vmware-vmx" process did not start properly.  Exit 0xed00

Searching through google revealed nothing of note, just a couple seamingly old unlrelated items. Luckilly there is a debug mode option you can set in Vmware Server. I opened my VM, and then performed this. Edit Virtual Machine Settings -> Options -> Advanced -> Run with debugging information

Note: Gentoo does not install the debugging version of the vmware-vmx binary with setuid permissions.

$ ls -al /opt/vmware/server/lib/bin-debug/vmware-vmx
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5143312 2006-08-28 07:23 /opt/vmware/server/lib/bin-debug/vmware-vmx
 
$ sudo chmod u+s /opt/vmware/server/lib/bin-debug/vmware-vmx
 
$ ls -al /opt/vmware/server/lib/bin-debug/vmware-vmx
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 5143312 2006-08-28 07:23 /opt/vmware/server/lib/bin-debug/vmware-vmx

Oddly VMware Console will be nice enough and it will tell you this error quite verbosely.

VMware Server Error:
VMware Server must be set-UID root, "/opt/vmware/server/lib/bin-debug/vmware-vmx" is not. Are you running /opt/vmware/server/lib/bin-debug/vmware-vmx from its distribution directory? That copy of the program is not set-UID root.
 
Press "Enter" to continue...
End of error message.

Attempting to run the VM this time produced a better error message. It wasn’t able to access my ~/.vmware directory on the remote machine for some reason. So I;

rm -rf ~/.vmware

The problem is gone when I power on the VM again. I think VMware could have saved me the trouble of all that by telling me they couldn’t access the directory without that much extra hassle of a debug mode, but at least it was easy enough to fix.
Hurray for errors! Well no boo errors, ehh who cares. While writing this, another one rears it’s ugly head.

My VMware Console is unable to connect to my remote machine with this error.

"Unable to connect to the remote host: 511 Error connecting to /opt/vmware/server/sbin/vmware-serverd process.."

Running htop shows the issue is quite simple.

PID USER     PRI  NI  VIRT   RES   SHR S CPU% MEM%   TIME+  Command
31337 root      25   0  115M  111M  4352 R 98.7  7.0 30:00.98 /opt/vmware/server/sbin/vmware-server

On my remote machine I perform;

sudo /etc/init.d/vmware-server restart

All is well when it starts back up again. Now to turn off debug mode in the options and take away setuid on the debug binary.

resources:

http://diaryproducts.net/about/operating_systems/unix/installing_vmware_server_on_gentoo_linux.vm

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_VMWare_Server

both of these are out of date technically, but they were still helpful to me.