ali aboos

I don’t recall the exact error message, but sometime after an unclean shutdown your virtual machines will not start with an error that contains “unable to unlock file”. To resolve the issue simply navigate to the directory where your virtual machine resides, and delete all files with .WRITELOCK and .lck extension.That should remove the lock and make your VM’s accessible. If that didn’t help, go ahead and delete all files EXCEPT .vmdk AND .vmx EXTENSIONS. That should definitely do the trick.

You can actually delete the .vmx files as well but in order to have VMware recreate them you will have to start the “new virtual machine wizard” and use the .vmdk as your disk file. Instead of creating a disk you use an existing.

To install VMware Server 1.x:

Install the following packages if you don’t already have them:
aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) openssl libssl-dev psmisc
Untar the package, navigate to vmware-server-distrib directory and type
./vmware-install.pl
To install VMware Tools:

The following packages are needed in order to install VMware Tools:
aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Open VMware Server Console and Click VM – Install VMware Tools. Then go to your guest Debain VM and mount the CD:
mount /dev/cdrom
I usually copy tar files to the hard drive and extract:
cp /media/cdrom0/VMwareTools-1.0.8-126538.tar.gz /root

cd /root/
tar -zxf VMwareTools-1.0.8-126538.tar.gz
If you want to directly untar it to another directory:
tar -zxf /media/cdrom0/VMwareTools-1.0.8-126538.tar.gz -C <directory>
Navigate to vmware-tools-distrib and execute the install command:
./vmware-install.pl
Follow directions and you should be able to install VMware Tools without incident.

Note: If you are running an early release of Debian Etch you may be asked to provide path to C compiler directory. That means you do not have a compiler installed and will have to install the following two packages:
aptitude install gcc-3.4 g++-3.4

To clear connection history in VIC go to regedit and delete the line “RecentConnections” from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware\VMware Infrastructure Client\Preferences.

To allow root access to logon through ssh in ESX:

Logon to console as root
Edit sshd_config: nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change “PermitRootLogin” from “no” to “yes”
Restart ssh: service sshd restart

To allow root access to logon through ssh in ESXi:

Open console and press Alt+F1
Type "unsupported" and enter root password to log on
Open inetd.conf in vi: vi /etc/inetd.conf
Find the line that starts with #ssh, uncomment, save and close the file, and then restart services on your ESXi server: /sbin/services.sh restart

To allow non-root access to logon through ssh in ESXi:

Log on to console: press Alt-F1 (or through root ssh)
Edit inetd.conf: vi /etc/inetd.conf
Find this line: "ssh stream tcp nowait root /sbin/dropbearmulti dropbear ++min=0,swap,group=shell -i" and add -w to the end. Save and close the file.
Create the new users and home directory: useradd -d /home/username -P username
Reboot

Setup is unable to find the “killall” program on your machine. Please make sure
it is installed. Do you want to specify the location of this program by hand?

Hit ctrl-c to break the process, then install “psmisc” package:
aptitude install psmisc

Now try again.