VMWare Server 2.0.2 and Centos 5.5

I figured after my last rant that it might be good to post the solution to the VMWare Server 2.0.2 problems I’d been encountering.  It’s been posted a bunch of times already, most notably by Gasparotto Nicolas at http://gasparotto.blogspot.com/2009/11/vmware-202-on-centos-54.html, but with CentOS 5.5 the process has changed slightly – the CentOS 5.3 repos are no longer available at … or They’ve moved to the vault.  So here’s how you do it (copied heavily from Nicolas):

1. You’ll need to be root to do this.
2. Go to /etc/yum.repos.d and copy the file CentOS-Base.repo to CentOS53-Base.repo.
3. In CentOS53-Base.repo, append a 53 to all packages within:
   • [base] ==> [base53]
   • [updates] ==> [updates53]
   • [addons] ==> [addons53]
   • [extras] ==> [extras53]
   • [centosplus] ==> [centosplus53]
   • [contrib] ==> [contrib53]
4. Comment out the mirrorlist directive in each package by putting a hash mark (#) at the beginning of the mirrorlist line.
5. Uncomment the baseurl directive in each package by removing the hash mark at the beginning of each baseurl line.
6. Replace all occurrences of baseurl= with baseurl=
7. At this point, you’ll want to downgrade glibc and any of its dependent packages.  One way of going about this is to just run yum downgrade glibc glibc-common, and see what packages yum says it’s going to remove because they’re dependent on glibc (answering no to the Is this ok [y/N] prompt).  Then add those to your downgrade command and rerun.  I can’t guarantee that’ll work for everyone, but it did for me.  Here was what my downgrade command ended up being:

   yum downgrade glibc\* nscd gcc gcc-c++ cpp libstdc++\* nss_ldap

8. Next, you’ll want to exclude the packages you downgraded from being updated in the future (at least until this program’s fixed). Essentially, you just want to add exclude=(list of downgraded packages) to /etc/yum.conf.  Here’s mine:

   exclude=glibc* nscd gcc gcc-c++ cpp libstdc++* nss_ldap

9. Finally, restart your server, and run /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl.  All should be then well with the world.

My instance of VMWare 2.0.2 has been up and running for about 24 hours at this point, which is longer than it’s been able to run in months.  I’ll post updates here if and when there are any.