I'm doing a school project for my masters and ran out of time setting up the system. Unfortunately, I can't easily use the removable hard drive I had at school.

The school does permit students to buy a portable hard drive and use VMware player to run virtual machines, at the student expense if they want to be able to work at home, vs the hard drive they provide as part of the tuition. I'm planning to borrow one for this.

If I can get the DNS server and DHCP server running with vmware, how easy would it be to either copy the conf files for dhcpd and bind from the portable drive to the removable drive (looks just like a regular SATA drive once it's in the machine) via a flash drive or e-mail?

Alternately, move the configuration files for CUPS, SSH server, and NFS including the part about excluding Root for NFS and SSH to the virtual machine?

Which do you guys think would be easier?

Also, could somebody list the files I'd need to move the configuration for Fedora 12 for the situation I described just to help me double check that I got everything?
Assume everything else is what is preinstalled off the DVD for Fedora 12, although I did yum install all those services and when possible the system-config utils.

It's easiest if you try to see a VMware guest as any other machine with the exception that you can not access the filesystem directly (except monolithic VMDKs which should be nbd-mountable using vmware-mount) if it's not powered up. So if you mean copying between filesystem and VMware image then either vmware-mount it or else just bring the guest(s) online and copy between filesystems and guests with SCP, FTP, SMB, removable USB devices, fd image, ISO image.

I've never used vmware, and am attempting to figure it out as I go.
Most of what you wrote is beyond me.
How difficult is it to get files onto my flash drive, or set up the virtual machine to put stuff onto either a Vista Home Preimum file share (the host OS), Windows 98SE file share, or an Appletalk share on my old Powermac 6500/300?

On the other end, will I have any difficulties copying the config files from the flash drive into the /etc folder provided I log in as root to do it? Windows doesn't generally like you trying to do things that way. You usually need to use slipstreaming or push them with group policy. If you can't do that, you usually have to set it up manually using the built-in interface. Since most of my Linux configuration seems to be done by editing .conf files, I assume I can simply copy them from one machine to another provided they are both running the same software?
I admit I barely know what I'm doing, but that was the point of the class. My only practical experience setting up DNS and DHCP is with Server 2003 and I tested out of most of the prerequisites. The school's choices are different from what I learned on and I've been adapting.

Cool.


In the VM host configure the VM guest: add USB adapter and enable it for the guest. Once the guest boots (check if access to the device is enabled) it should automount after which you can copy over files: How to transfer files between VMPLAYER session and host computer, Copy Files between Guest and Host with VMWare Player.


Some configuration files may contain information that is local to the machine (hostname, accounts, hardware configuration, network settings) and some don't. So generally speaking copying files between Linux instances should not be problematic as long as you respect CR/LF settings (in case you edit them during copying in a different OS). Making backups and using versioning are considered standard practices.

In this case, I'm actually TRYING to copy the hostname and network settings, although there is one change in that the default gateway on my home network is 192.168.1.1 while the default gateway at the school lab is 10.50.something (got it written down, don't feel like finding it in my notes).
Other than that, I'm trying to treat the machines as if they were the same, since I'm just trying to get things to work at home, copy the config files, and install them on the school machine to set up the simulated network. Among other things that are given to me are hostname and network settings. I am after all setting up a DNS and DHCP server.

FWIW in VMware Server (probably not Player) you can use the built-in DHCPCd to create an isolated 10.50/16 subnet easily. That way you could probably mimic your school LAN setup better.