So the last time I messed with my VM, I needed IT to come and build a new VM for me to use.
You think I would have learned better than to mess around with vmware when everything was working mostly fine.

This morning, I came in to work to a perfectly working VM and everything was fine. However, ever since IT had gotten me to install VMWare Player to create my new VM, I hadn’t been able to use VMWare Server. I figured I would remedy this.

First step was straightforward enough… uninstall VMWare Player. Unfortunately, it seems that doing so also uninstalled VMWare Server. Fine, whatever.

Second step then became to reinstall VMWare Server. This didn’t quite work… apparently I’m missing a couple kernel source files. As a result, it was unable to build the VSOCK module. This meant that my VMs, when run through VMWare Server, had no network access. This is a problem when the entire point of your VM is to run tests remotely.

After trying without success to sync the required source files, I figured I’d cut my losses and go back to the player. Uninstalled VMWare Server and reinstalled VMWare Player.

This install didn’t quite work right. It didn’t create the shortcut in my Applications menu, which I tried to do. Then, on launching, it was unable to read some required files to start up unless I ran it with sudo. In the end, I decided to just tell the shortcut to sudo it, because I didn’t want to start chowning the actual VM files.

So yeah. That took most of the morning and resulted in a less-usable Player (have to run with sudo now). Blah.

I am not touching my VM again for a while. :P