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After running Ubuntu Lucid for a 6 months, I can write down a couple of things about VMware & Lucid.
I have migrated reinstalled and installed 10 systems that run 64 bit Lucid now with 'virtual' flavor kernels. All of these VMs:
- are configured to auto-upgrade as much as possible. This is what their
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades
looks like:Code Block perl perl Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins { "Ubuntu lucid-security"; "Ubuntu lucid-updates"; }; Unattended-Upgrade::Mail "sysadmin@terena.org"; Unattended-Upgrade::Remove-Unused-Dependencies "true"; Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot "true";
- need manual installation of VMware tools after kernel upgrades that include API bumps. So far this has happened once per month on average. The tar.gz way is not the most efficient way, you can automate it quite a bit. The VMs should have the source unpacked in
/usr/src/vmware-tools-distrib
to start with. Now, if there is a kernel upgrade, the VMs will roll this upgrade, and reboot. When they come back online, they do not run the tools. At that point, it is only a matter of running this on the just-upgraded VMs:
You might need to manuallyCode Block perl perl #!/bin/bash /usr/src/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl --default apt-get autoremove
rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.32-old-version
because those directories contain the VMware modules, and hence might not be removed byapt-get autoremove
.
The good thing is that the module installation can be initiated over the network. This used to kill your sessions because of replacing network modules, but that doesn't happen any more.