July 30, 2015

140 words 1 min read

Using Linux under VMWare? Install open-vm-tools

vSphere
I’ve been a long time user of VMWare ESXi for my baremetal hypervisor needs. In order for it to function at its best, the recommendation has always been to install the

VMWare Tools. On Windows this is an exe and a piece of cake. However on Linux it has always been a gamble.

However, a few years back VMWare created the

open-vm-tools projects and is slowly starting to direct Linux users to use this package. Unfortunately, that’s not actually mentioned in some versions of ESXi. It has, joyfully, made it’s way into most distros package management suite. My Linux flavor of choice is, of course, Ubuntu where it’s a pre-built package. However it may require the multiverse be enabled.

So next time you install Ubuntu under ESXi, your first (or second) command should be:

$ sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools

apt-get linux open-vm-tools Ubuntu virtualization vmware esxi vsphere wajig

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Last night I had programmatically created a large number of users on a server. Today, I started getting emails from the users complaining that their new accounts didn’t work. Turns out my user creation script had not set their passwords correctly, so I needed to reset everyone’s password. Try as I might, I could not find an automagic method to do so with passwd; thankfully, it turns out there is another command to use for this.

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