I have 2 VM's that are currently running CentOS.

Soon I will include ASL within them. I wanted to ask. I am running vmtools on both. When I install ASL which will install its own kernel grsec etc will there be any issue ? Should I do anything at all about that in order not to cause any problem ?

CentOS 5.6
ESXi 4.1

Regards

There are open-vm-tools packages in the repo too

I didn't know ... But I installed them the usual way... Should this constitute and problem and therefore should I remove them before installing ASL and then reinstall them from yum ?

Thanks

Regards

I don't think so, but using the open-vm-tools package is the easier route, since it automatically gets updated via yum and you don't need to compile the kernel modules yourself, etc.

I take it you're talking about VMware VM's, right?

Yes its the vmware vmtools.
Ahmm. I'll give it a shot with the repo tools.

I have installed open vm tools but there are errors. They are functioning but I don't think its nice to have errors flying around without reason especially on a fresh installation.
I managed to take a screenshot from the console so you can take a look and tell me your opinion.



Also when I shut down the server again there is error that it cannot unmount ....
I tried removing and reinstalling through yum but nothing changed.

Any ideas ? Thanks !

If you're running the ASL kernel in locked mode (which is the default, ALLOW_kmod_loading="no" in /etc/asl/config) then attempts to load kernel modules at runtime will always fail. You'll need to reboot to allow modifications to the kernel.

This protection doesn't allow realtime loading of kernel modules. I have rebooted the system. And there I get the errors.
These errors shown in the screenshot are from boot time of the server.

Ahmm... Noticed that the ASL kernel was not being used during boottime. No idea why this happened. So I followed the following steps which I have done in the past as well without problems.

yum remove kernel
yum install kernel

So the only installed kernel is the ASL one.

Now when I reboot I get that the file not found since it only seeks for the "old" centos kernel and in the grub list the asl kernel doesn't even show up !!!

Also while the kernel was being installed I got a grubby template not found...
In the grub.conf the only kernel that I saw before reboot was the asl one.

Any ideas ? Why is the boot acting so weird ? Could this have to do anything with the vm tools messing arround with something I wonder.

I logged in using rescue system and changed the grub.conf to the ASL kernel img and initrd and now I once again get file not found. Even though I saw the kernel on the /boot.


Thanks

regards

Sounds like something is messed up with your boot setup, though I don't think the open-vm-tools package does anything with that.

* What does rpm -qa | grep ^kernel | sort return?
* What does uname -a return?
* What are the contents of /etc/grub.conf?

I made a small typo when correcting through rescue in the grub.conf. I booted just now.
But it seems extremely weird that the kernel even though it was installed through yum the grub.conf was not fixed right so it boots the kernel...

Well, you got a grubby template error, so that's probably why the grub.conf entry was not added properly. Now, I don't know why you got that grubby error in the first place...

I must look into it for sure. I can't leave that problem for later ...

Know in the open vm tools I only get vmmemctl not found. Scott would you know about that error ? What does it even mean ?

vmmemctl is a VMware kernel module that I used to have when I wasn't using open-vm-tools yet. Did you properly uninstall the VMware Tools installation you had before you switched to the open-vm-tools package? My guess is that you're looking at some leftovers from the previous VMware Tools setup.

Looks like vmmemctl is now deprecated, but they didnt dereference it from the scripts. From the NEWS file:

* vmmemctl: Linux driver removed (it's now upstream), plus cleanup and simplification of the FreeBSD and Solaris drivers.

Presumably that means its part of the native kernel now.