[5943] in Release_7.7_team
[Vmware-release] erratic behavior of Athena VMs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Thu Mar 20 17:18:07 2008
Message-Id: <200803202117.m2KLHRZD024781@dit.mit.edu>
To: vmware-release@MIT.EDU
cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, jdreed@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU, gettes@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:17:27 -0400
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
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Hi,
Since my recent success at getting a dhcp-networked Athena VM working,
I've run into erratic behavior I can't consistently reproduce:
The VM I was running at work broke (due to something that was my
fault), so I deleted it and attempted to recreate it exactly as I had
originally done- I used the VM that BillC provided me, booted into
single user mode to reset the root password with /usr/athena/bin/passwd,
and edited /etc/athena/rc.conf appropriately (I set ADDR to dhcp since
I had previously made a network request to set the machine up for dhcp).
On reboot to multiuser mode, both network and AFS were broken and nothing
I attempted would fix them.
Taking Bill's advice that perhaps the player caches the location of
the previously existing machine, I installed the new copy in a
separate directory. Didn't help. I searched for all VMWare-related
files on the host machine and deleted them, and reinstalled the
player. Didn't help. Until this point, I had networking in the player
set to bridged as it had been before. I tried NAT, and then network
started working, but AFS was still broken (for reference, the Athena
release level of the VM is 9.4.43, which I can't update further due to
the rpm conflict I reported before between VMwarePlayer in newer Athena
releases and VMwareTools in the VM).
Next attempt: I deleted this VM, and copied a suspended VM on my home
system that had been working perfectly there and copied it back to
work (my Windows Vista test host machine at work, that is). It worked
fine for about 4 hours (networking set to bridge), then network
suddenly died for no obvious reason, taking AFS with it. I rebooted
the VM (about all I could do at that point), and it's now working
again (this is as of about 15 min. ago)...
Alex
