I logged into my Ubuntu VMWare Guest and found the time had drifted by about 15 minutes…

I have seen all sorts of conjecture as to why you should / shouldn’t run ntpd to keep your vm time in-sync. So I thought I would install vmware-tools… which does it for you. Not so easy the last time I tried it failed. This time it worked fine. Here is how I did it.

Versions:
I’m on VMWare Server as follows
VMware Infrastructure Web Access – Version 2.0.0 Build 122589
VMware Server – Version 2.0.0 Build 122956
Host: Ubuntu 8.04
Guest: Ubuntu 8.10

Caveats:
My VMWare guest is running “headless” (without an XServer) so I don’t know if this works for a guest that is used with X.

How to:
Login via the web interface
https://name_or_address_of_vmware_server_host_computer:8333
if you are on the Host machine then it’s simply:
https://localhost:8333/

Open the Ubuntu 8.10 Guest in VMWare Infrastructure Web Access and:
click the “Install VMWare Tools…” option
open Guest’s Console and log in as root.

Do the following in the guest:
Note: You don’t want to be ssh’d into the client to do this. You may lose network!

# This is needed to compile the VMWare modules on the guest
apt-get install build-essential 

# check the version of the running kernel
uname -r 
# this is the output of uname -r
# which is the kernel version you need matching headers for
2.6.27-11-server 

# install your headers
apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

# before doing this you need to click the "Install VMWare Tools..."
# link in VMWare Web Access
mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
cd /root
tar -zxvf /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-2.0.0-122956.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl

vmware-config-tools.pl #accept the defaults

When finished reboot.

I tried to get the network running by doing:

/etc/init.d/networking stop
rmmod pcnet32
modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/networking stop

But this didn’t work I rebooted and it all came up fine.