Thanks to my buddy Rick for helping me get my Astaro Security Gateway running inside of VMWare Fusion on OS X Server 10.5.6.

I’ve been running VMWare for several years now on a relatively low-end P3, then AMD 1400+ processor white box and it has never had a hiccup.  With energy prices the way they are, I’ve been trying to pare down the hardware I’m running at home and putting ASG in a VM seemed to be a logical place to start.  I tried putting it together under Fusion 1.x, and just kept running into roadbolocks surrounding the NIC’s. Fusion 1.x just couldn’t access two hardware nics to do the routing requred for a security gateway.

Fusion 2.x appears on the surface to have the same problem since it doesn’t give any way through the GUI to do add a 2nd real NIC.  The capability is there, however.  You just need to open the package that contains your virtual machine, and edit the .vmx file to add the commands necessary to bring one up.  The instructions for this can be found on the vmware support site.

The only trick is getting vmnet0 and vmnet2 assigned to the proper real nic (eth0 or eth1).  If it doesnt’ come up right the first time, just switch them in the .vmx file and you should be golden.

Once I did all that, started up ASG 7 and restored my config and licenses I needed to re-enter my root password (that seems tied to the hardware somehow) and I was up and running.  1 old server decomissioned.

Last Wednesday was my last day at work before a long weekend with my kids, who were home on spring break. At the end of the day I was scrambling to print out a product specification sheet to sign off on and return to the vendor before I left. I printed the document from MS Word to my Novell Netware server running iPrint and heard beeeeep… The signal of death from a Netware box.

I looked over and the cluster node it was on had abended in Apache2 with the LibC module being the culprit. These kinds of flaky things happen occasionally, so Power cycled the box (it hard locked, not letting me even write an abend log before restart) and waited for iPrint to roll ove to another node in the cluster. When it did, I printed again. Same result…. beeeep… Another cluster node bites the dust. Now I was pissed. This obviously wasn’t some corrupt PostScript font or something. I took the Word document and made it into a PDF, thinking this would clean up any funky code or fonts in the doc, then I tried to print it back to the original server that had now come back up and got iPrint running again… beeeep… ARGH!!

I lost patience and called the vendor to fax me the sheet so I could leave and took off for the long weekend convinced it was still some sort of document problem. Well today I had to print something for the first time this week and guess what… Crash and hard lock again on a different document. Now it was a apparent that it was a bigger issue so off to the Novell support website I run off to while servers reset themselves. What do I find but two TIDs on this issue.

• NetWare 6.5 server ABENDs in LIBC and Apache2 on iPrint server
• Unable to install iPrint printer from Macintosh workstations

The first TID explains that the recent Apple Security Update 2008-002 introduced problems with printing to iPrint servers, namely Abending and crashing the server. It offers patches to fix the Abend problem. The second TID explains that while the Abend problem can be alleviated, once applied the patches break the iPrint client’s ability to add printers to the computer from the browser and they need to be manually added through the Printer preference pane. This defeats most of the purpose of iPrint.

I’ll try to call Apple when I have a minute to see what they have to say about it.

To top it off, while trying to get this issue tracked down, I discovered that My tape jukebox is reporting an error… another problem for another day.