Using snapshots to share changes to VM for college classes

bazzawill — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 05:03:19 GMT

I am a student studying Cyber Security. In many of my courses I am required to use a prebuilt VM from my lecturer. As an external student this requires me downloading one or more VM images. One of my courses had 13 images requiring 100gb download*. Would it be possible for all the lecturers to get together and work off one unified set of base images for Windows 10, Windows Server, Linux
Then use snapshots and clones to create each of the required images. While in theory this would be possible using a single install / image this would obviously not be practical for the lecturers. What would be ideal is if they could create the base image share it amount themselves then create snapshots to share with students that can be loaded into the base VM.

*Not a VMWare problem but some downloads failed and needed to be redownloaded

VMWare-netcfg wayland (sway)

bazzawill — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 02:53:18 GMT

I am trying to run vmware-netcfg under sway when I try to launch from vmware-workstation nothing happens running from the terminal gets me

sudo -E vmware-netcfg
Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified
(vmware-netcfg:): Gtk-WARNING **: : cannot open display: :0

Google various parts of this error has led me down many rabbit holes including forum posts that seem to think that this is just broken under wayland and it is all vmwares fault with a janky workaround to spawn a additional Xsession
This works but the post is quite old and I am sure this is not the problem

To test I also get the same error running xeyes

More googling led me to posts about dbus and xhosts but all are installed and I have tried editing my exec line for sway to include

Adding my user to the seat group has enabled xeyes to function. The problem is either that I cannot run vmware-netcfg as root using any combination of sudo flags (this seems to be by design of wayland in my brief research)
Running with out sudo gives me

vmware-netcfg

(vmware-netcfg:486817): dbind-WARNING **: 13:14:10.943: Couldn't register with accessibility bus: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
==== AUTHENTICATING FOR org.freedesktop.policykit.exec ====
Authentication is needed to run `/usr/bin/vmware-netcfg' as the super user

Then asks for username my password and gives

polkit-agent-helper-1: error response to PolicyKit daemon: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: No session for cookie
==== AUTHENTICATION FAILED ====
Error executing command as another user: Not authorized

This incident has been reported.

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Using snapshots to share changes to VM for college classes

VMWare-netcfg wayland (sway)