[UPDATE]: Read the updated article here

So VMware Server 2.x on Fedora 11 has been driving me nuts. I recently re-imaged my workstation and decided to ditch VMware Server and give Linux qemu-kvm a try since it is now the default hypervisor in Fedora and will be the standard hypervisor going forward in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (http://www.redhat.com/rhel).

We are an almost exclusively Windows shop so we use Windows DHCP servers and Windows Deployment Services (WDS/RIS) server to image all of our workstations and servers via PXE booting. If we were using an ISC dhcpd server things would probably have been a lot easier. Below I describe how I get things (partially) working.

I've had this a couple of times now in the last few weeks. I wanted to try out the Linux KVM virtualization hypervisor that comes with Fedora 11 since VMware Server 2 is giving my fits on F11 x86_64 so I installed qemu and all the supporting packages via yum.

I realized that I can't do some things with KVM that I can with VMware Server so I'm putting up with the signal 6 crashes every week or so and went back to VMware Server 2.0.1 for Linux. In order to get that running I had to apply some patches to get the kernel modules compiled but that's been done for a while.

First some background about web applications firewalls for the uninitiated. If you already know what a web app firewall is then you can skip down to the bottom of the post for some mod_security rules that will help you with Drupal Views, the GMap module admin pages, and Google Webmaster Tools.

Twitter is all the rage these days and I've been using one of the more popular desktop Twitter applications - TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com. TweetDeck runs on top of Adobe AIR - http://www.adobe.com/products/air/.

My day-to-day OS on my workstation is Linux (Fedora 10 to be exact). I installed Adobe AIR and TweetDeck with no issues on the initial installation.

There are a lot of postings out on the Net about performance tuning VMware products to run more efficiently. I'd thought I'd share some that I thought were farily useful (most related to running VMware Server on a Linux host).

[UPDATE] 2009-03-13

Happy Friday the 13th. Just an update to this story - the SIPE plugin has been worked on by a number of great people including Gabriel Burt from Novell among a host of others. It is now stable and can be used with recent versions of Pidgin.

Check out their great work at http://sipe.sourceforge.net/. The source code can be downloaded at https://sourceforge.net/projects/sipe/files/

[End UPDATE]