OK, I'm mystified. Mike/Scott -- any ideas?

On my test setup (rh9 under vmware workstation), I just updated everything - grsec kernel to 2.4.30-2.


Unfortunately with the 2.4.30-2 kernel, the vmware ethernet adapter would not come up (it was "missing" according to the error message).

So I reverted to the 2.4.29-7 grsec kernel and it worked fine.

What info can I give you to help trace the problem?

Faris.

What distro is this happening on and what version of vmware? Worst case you can just send us your image. I generally do all my debugging on linux in vmware 4.5.2, on rh9 and CentOS 3.4 images.

This is vmware 5 (you MUST upgrade - multiple snapshots of one vm, with multiple branches!) on Windows XP.

But I just restored a snapshot and tried again (this time updating only the kernel and not kernel-sources), and this time no problems with the ethernet adapter.

I suspect it has something to do with vmware-tools, which I'm not at all happy with (I had to fix a broken symlink for XFreeconfig before they would do anything useful at all, and they won't re-compile properly for the grsec kernels, and ...)

I'm about to try again.

Faris.

Yeah Ive got VMware 5 installed, but I havent finished moving all my images over into it. As I've been testing out glibc modifications for CentOS/3ES/Whitebox lately, so Im trying to minimize variables for testing. Glibc believe it or not, is even more complex than the kernel in terms of subtlety.

Most odd. On my third try the problem returned again.

The actual error that comes on the screen is:
"Bringing up interface eth0: vmics device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization."

Faris.

update: well, as long as you have kernel-sources already installed, running vmware-config.pl or whatever it is called seems to fix things.

But if you don't have kernel-sources installed, looks like you are stuffed.

Anyway, I wouldn't worry about this Scott. I think this is a vmware issue. Sorry for the false alarm.

To close the thread on this, yes its VMWare, you must reconfigure vmware anytime you install a new kernel. VMWare used kernel modules that need to be built for the kernel you are running. So, you will need the kernel-sources.