VMware and Unity

I've been running Fedora 11 (x64) on my workstation at work and running Windows XP (32b) in a VMware virtual machine. It was a VM I'd created with server so all I needed to run it was the free VMware Player.

First, installing VMware Player was a bit of a problem. The install from RPM didn't work, it hosed initially. Then the install from the bundle also failed... Much like it does for many users Online it turned out so there was a community-created patch which worked just fine.

Then there was running the VM. Initially, it seemed great. I was running Windows XP full-screen on my right-screen and had my Fedora desktop / apps on my left screen. But it was pretty wonky about mouse control so I got to the point where I was firing up the Windows VM only when I needed it and then not in full-screen mode.

But I discovered that VMware's Unity mode helps bridge the gap. It pulls you out of console mode and launches any apps from the guest VM in their own windows in your desktop environment. This is especially useful for say, running MSIE or MS Outlook. It's still a little weird because the apps *look* like they should be running natively yet the responsiveness is clearly far behind local apps, but the only real gap is that I can't Shift+Right-Click -> Run As... on tools like Active Directory Users and Computers (which I need). I tried switch back to the console, doing the Run As... and then switching back to Unity, but the escalated app doesn't show up.

Well, it's great and closes the gap some, but for now I'll just keep updating Player and Tools and see if eventually that full-screen mode just gets fixed and works transparently.

- Arch

Virtual Host Debugging

I just came across this obscure feature of apache2ctl / httpd:

# apache2ctl -S
VirtualHost configuration:
wildcard NameVirtualHosts and _default_ servers:
*:443                  webmail.nibble.bz (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/webmail.nibble.bz:3)
*:80                   is a NameVirtualHost
         default server alia.dl.nibble.bz (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default:2)
         port 80 namevhost alia.dl.nibble.bz (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default:2)
         port 80 namevhost blog.nibble.bz (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/blog.nibble.bz:3)
         port 80 namevhost www.nibble.bz (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/blog.nibble.bz:17)
         port 80 namevhost forums.thenibble.org (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/forums.thenibble.org:2)
         port 80 namevhost lists.thenibble.org (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/lists.thenibble.org:10)
         port 80 namevhost siona.nibble.bz (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/siona.nibble.bz:1)
         port 80 namevhost uro.mine.nu (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/uro.mine.nu:2)
         port 80 namevhost webmail.nibble.bz (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/webmail.nibble.bz:51)
         port 80 namevhost www.thenibble.org (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/www.thenibble.org:3)
         port 80 namevhost thenibble.org (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/www.thenibble.org:15)
Syntax OK

"man apache2ctl" doesn't give the switch parameters but merely alludes to the presence of them:

SYNOPSIS
When acting in pass-through mode, apachectl can take all the arguments available for the httpd binary.

apachectl [ httpd-argument ]

And on my system (Ubuntu 8.04), "man httpd" doesn't report diddly. It is in a manpage *somewhere* so I found it Online:

http://www.manpagez.com/man/8/httpd/

And what it says is:

-S Show the settings as parsed from the config file (currently only
shows the virtualhost settings).

So there you go. Hidden away in the documentation "somewhere" is possibly the most useful virtual host diagnostic tool.

- Arch