[Gllug] VMware Server on Debian Etch AMD64 - anyone got this to work?

[James Roberts]

{Thud] Ouch {Thud] Ouch {Thud] Ouch! {Th-Bang] Ooh!

This is the sound of me banging my head against the wall while trying to 
get the following working:

- HP ML 115 with Opteron 100 series dual core and 5 (4+1) GB RAM
- Debian Etch AMD64
- VMWare server

This is a new but burnt-in server. I have a lot of them in fact, and so 
have tried two different boxes with no variations. All pass all hardware 
tests.

I have spent over three days building and rebuilding various 
permutations but none of them work - at least, not for long.

I started with Ubuntu server 64 as it had the newer kernels but I won;t 
talk about my experiences with that before the 9pm watershed.

So I went back to Debian and got the whole lot installed beautifully - 
with the MUI installed and working. However when I tried to install a 
new VM from an iso image it ate the whole boot drive (not the drive 
where the vm's are). Unbootable.

I decided I had gone a bit wild when I actually installed a GUI so 
rebuilt with minimal install, etc etc. Could not then access from a 
remote w/s - eventually fixed strange pam issues and got it working, 
whereupon every time I tired to add a vm the whole of my network went 
down and my heretofore totally stable w/s locked up. I swapped the 
switch to see if that made any difference and it didn't.

(I'm only picking on the highlights here, there were many other dark 
corridors...)

Anyway, I am now rebuilding with the i386 image instead using the bigmem 
kernel.

After the ramble: has *anyone* got the combination of Opteron 100 
series/Debian Etch:AMD64/VMWare server (or similar) to work, and could 
you pretty please give me any hints if so?

Thank you.

MeJ



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