Happy 1st Birthday TaoSecurity Blog

Today this Blog is one year old. My first post was 8 Jan 03. I started this Blog as a "hard drive for my brain," since I dislike keeping bookmarks and I prefer to place Internet links and news within context.

I decided today to try to get VMWare 3.x working fully within FreeBSD, so I installed the VMWare3 port (version vmware3 3.2.1.2242-2) on my FreeBSD 4.9 STABLE system. First I made this change as recommended by the port install directions:

janney# sysctl kern.ipc.shm_allow_removed=1
kern.ipc.shm_allow_removed: 0 -> 1

I then added this line to /etc/sysctl.conf to enable this at boot time:

kern.ipc.shm_allow_removed=1

I then mounted linproc:

janney# mount_linprocfs linproc /compat/linux/proc
janney# mount
/dev/amrd0s1a on / (ufs, NFS exported, local)
/dev/amrd0s1h on /home (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/amrd0s1g on /tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/amrd0s1e on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/amrd0s1f on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
procfs on /proc (procfs, local)
linprocfs on /usr/compat/linux/proc (linprocfs, local)

I added this line to /etc/fstab to enable this at boot time:

linprocfs   /usr/compat/linux/proc  linprocfs   rw 0 0

I executed '/usr/local/etc/rc.d/vmware.sh start' and saw it created a new pseudo-interface:

vmnet1: flags=8943 mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
        inet6 fe80::2bd:65ff:fee2:6601%vmnet1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x9
        ether 00:bd:65:e2:66:01

I also saw the following existed:

janney# ls /compat/linux/dev
hda     null    tty0    tty10   tty12   tty3    tty5    tty7    tty9    vmnet1
hdb     rtc     tty1    tty11   tty2    tty4    tty6    tty8    vmmon

I made sure my /usr/local/lib/vmware/licenses/user/license.ws.3.0 file had the appropriate license, and then fired up VMWare. I installed Red Hat Linux 6.2 as a test OS. For networking I created a "custom" entry with /dev/vmnet1. Once the OS installation was complete everything worked. I could ping my gateway and reach the VM from outside hosts.