Order of the Bath

Having installed a virtual client for web development using Ubuntu desktop under VMware Fusion there are just a few loose ends to tidy up.

• We need it to have a fixed IP address so we can find it easily from the rest of the network. You can either modify the client so that it doesn’t use dhcp and assign a fixed address or configure your dhcp server (usually part of the router) to assign a fixed address to the incoming request. I chose the latter. At the same time you can tell your clients about it (in the hosts files) as it won’t be resolved by DNS.
• It would be convenient to have ssh and ftp available to completely mimic the production server. This is described below.
• We need to install the VMwareTools to improve the desktop interface. There is a good guide to that on the Ubuntu Tutorials.

Installing ssh is as simple as
sudo apt-get install openssh-server
Similarly ftp can be done using
sudo apt-get install wu-ftpd
but there is a little configuration to do for the latter. Wu-ftpd is set up for inetd and we have xinetd installed by default so the configuration file needs to be converted. A script is provided to do that.
sudo su
xconv.pl < /etc/inetd.conf > /etc/xinetd.conf
exit
but beware if you have already customised xinetd.conf as this will lose them.

This entry was posted on 7 May 2008 at 10:25 by Rick and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.