I wanted to create a twitter feed of things my daughters were doing with the goal of easily updating the grandparents on what they were doing. Now, they aren't twitter users but I use twitter enough that it was an easy medium. I wrote a little python script that runs every few minutes and emails them the updates.

We have a set of 11 linux servers that function as our VMware hosts. While these systems are not necessarily all the same hardware, they need to look identical as it relates to software and kernel versions. I’ve been working on system to automate the tasks done on these machines. What I’ve come up with has so far and will work pretty well.

Eureka! I found it. So now I can automate the vmware-config.pl part of the installation. It turns out that VMware Server keeps a database of sorts in /etc/vmware/locations. This is created during the vmware-install.pl run. If you append “answer EULA_AGREED yes” (without the quotes) to the locations file, it will not present you with the EULA. Here is the complete code. Again, please comment.

I’ve been looking around the net to find a way to automate a VMware Server install on Linux. In the documentation there is a way to automate the install for Windows, but not Linux. In our environment, we run a minimal Ubuntu 7.10 install for our hosts. Below is my hackish attempt to automate it. This works for our environment but I make no claims it will work for yours. The first script (shown below) installs the packages and sets a couple variables that are important to us.