telfred's Posts

A first general comment having installed a beta product you then ask about whether it has security holes, umm The serious point here is that a VM guest will only be as protected as the OS that is running on it. So if you choose not to install / configure a firewall and anti-virus then attach it to the internet, well low and behold the machine will be infected if viruses exist to infect it. The method of infection has implications for the safety of the host or other physical computers, an e-mail virus could infect the host etc just as it could infect the VM guest. If the VM guest uses removable media that becomes infected which is then placed in another physical computer the physical computer will become infected. The best advice which is protect the VM guest as if it were a physical computer, hosts do not tend to get infected directly from the VM guest however with the tendency of viruses to use networking distribution there are no guarantees. A good security ploy is to use one of the more obscure operating systems as nobody can be bothered to write viruses for them however they don't tend to be very good at playing games

First comment has the hard drive been attached to a physical computer ? Having been attached to the physical computer does the hard drive work ? If these steps haven't happened you can forget whatever anybody wanted you to do with it. It is possible to use VMWare Converter however it does not work over the network at the moment so there would need to be a number of Gb free on a local hard disk. PS VMWare Converter has its own forum, where the users will be able to help you far more than in the VM Workstation forum.

I'm no network specialist either however what needs to happen is for the ip address of the VM guest to be changed to something close enough for your subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 to work. So the first two numbers of the VM guests ip address would have to be match those of the host ip address. As to how you change an ip address in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 others know far more than me.

As I understand it, you are not finding the lockup problems with OSes apart from Vista. The basic problem with Vista is that Vista has incomplete support in versions of VM Workstation before version 6. VM Player is unlikely to be any better than VM Workstation.

Just to clarify the host is running Madriva and VM Ware Workstation 5.5.3 has installed but does not work. It use to work on 5.5.2. Do you have a backup of the system before you installed 5.5.3 ?

I think since the keyboards here are lower tech standard 101/ 102 or Microsoft Natural Ps2, unfortunately this maybe dodging the problem that you are experiencing. It maybe worth trying with the old things and see if it is any better.

To clarify the basic problem is the computer with VNC Viewer has one keyboard layout and the computer with VNC Server that is also running the VM Ware guest has another keyboard layout. On top of this the OS installed on the VM guest will have its own keyboard layout ! The best I can suggest in the short term is to make sure that all three are running the same keyboard layout. Although if the VNC Server is also used directly rather than always through the VNC Viewer the chosen layout may be confusing. I appreciate that different input locales make the suggestion above impossible so in that case it's just like using the VM Ware guest directly with a different input locale it becomes a case of remembering which keys are which ! Sorry if that's no real help

As you are planning to use Windows OSes on the host and the VM guest it is possible to drag and drop files between from Windows explorer on one to Windows explorer on the other. Also the clipboard is shared between them so text can be copied back and forth. This would leave them more isolated than using shared folders. Another option for moving files about would be using a Windows network share on another machine to "pass" files between the two computers.

How much RAM does the host computer have allocated to it ? How much RAM does the VM guest have allocated to it ? If the host is attached to a Windows domain is there an anti-virus software that can be started by a remote server ? That happens here and has a major impact on the host computer's ability to do very much although the VM guest usually just slows to a crawl rather than crashing outright.