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I had recently been getting some rather odd segmentation faults when running webalizer against some (not all) of my domains. Problem was that it wouldn’t always happen so i didn’t pay a great deal of attention to it. I later figured the up – then down – then up was related to my log rotation (yeah – duh!), so something in the logs was causing the process to fail.

After some serious digging (it drove me a little nuts) and a plethora of less than helpful tips and references I stumbled across this:  Webalizer – Web Server Statistics “how to”.

Apparently it has something to do with the way browsers accessing the site report their name and that some have multiple parens (‘(‘ and ‘)’) in it. This had the affect of confusing the mangle agent that reports agent names accessing the site. The fix was specifying a MangleAgents value other than 1 (zero or 2 worked fine). I set it to 2 and all is well – I now have all my stats working again.

Well after some serious stuffing about i finally gave up on vmware. My latest kernel upgrade to 2.6.26.x just wouldn’t play nice regardless of what i did. Advice was sought from relevant places to no avail – even though the number of people with a similar issue was (is) growing. A colleague with an identical issue upgraded to the vmware 2 release candidate and the issue was not noticed there.  There was no inclination to go down that road – its a 450MB+ download, runs in a browser window, and looks like a rather bloated setup compared to the 1.x releases  No problem though as i’ve discovered VirtualBox.

After a little bit of stuffing around to get the bridge networking up and running (vmware did this for you on startup quite nicely), i’m all good now with a couple of guest operating systems installed and running with no issue. Some useful docs and info for setting up with Debian can be found on the Debian Virtual Box wiki here. A huge plus is also that it comes with a neat script to build the vbox module for the running kernel.

Overall, so far VirtualBox is more than a suitable replacement for vmware. Give it a shot if you haven’t already.

Perhaps a recurring theme…

In any case take a look here: http://groups.google.com/group/vmkernelnewbies/web/how-to-install-vmware-in-2-6-26-linux-kernel

Theres a new vmware-any-any patch that fixes the build error under kernel 2.6.26.

I always forget how to do this and subsequent updates bugger things up.

We are trying to tell the system that the hardware clock is set to UTC.

Edit the following: /etc/default/rcS. Modify UTC to read UTC=yes (or no depending on what you are trying to achieve).

Some additional good resources for time:  Debian Administration and the Debian online docs.

More 2.6.25 issues…

Attempt to build nvidia module for kernel 2.6.25.1 failed. The nvidia installer needs to be patched as described here. After this. just build and install as normal and all is well.

I recently upgraded my kernel from 2.6.24.4 to 2.6.25.1. In trying to rebuild vmware server against the new kernel, i came up with a few issues.

A bit of digging uncovered this: http://lenrek.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/vmware-105-and-kernel-2625/. It got me up and running quite nicely.

Small point to note – i used to apply the vmware-any-any-update-116 patch and then run /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl. Patches for the 2.6.25 kernel do not apply to a patched vmware-server install. i ran without the any-any patch and all worked fine nonetheless.

Finally, as i normally do i executed the following to ensure correct operation of the console:

cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0
mv libpng12.so.0 libpng12.so.0.old
ln -sf /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 libpng12.so.0
cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1
mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.old
ln -sf /lib/libgcc_s.so.1

Used this a while ago and recently revisited for an update. It downloads icons from all over to come up with a custom unified look based around the Tango Icon Theme Guidelines.

Check it out here… well worth a look especially if you run Gnome or XFCE.