# 2008-06-xx
 
Trying out other vmware server version (2, rather than 1) on diagsim,
in order to get up to 8.0 rather than 3.6 GB available.  

vmware-server 1.0.x was installed, and operated well, allowing multiple users
to log in with vmware-server-console and start or make new virtual machines.
Its significant limitation was a 3.6GB memory limit per virtual machine.

vmware-server 2.0 beta2 was tried at the beginning of June, and took some
hours to get running properly (hald needed to be started). It was not clear
how to let multiple normal users start/stop/create virtual machines, so 
the necessary ones were started as root, running vnc servers.
This version has a 8.0GB memory limit.   Initial non-starting problems were
solved by having hald running(!).   The user interface has regressed: it 
is now only web-based, much less neat than the previous vmware-console, and
not so easy for allowing many users to connect and disconnect usb devices.

After the summer, it was reverted to version 1, by request: the main 
program being run was `flux' which seems not to make use of the extra 
memory anyway!


###

modified in /etc/vmware/init.d/vmware
of vmware-server, to avoid using the 
(RAM tmpfs) /tmp directory for temporary files.

make_tmp_dir() {
  local dirname="$1" # OUT
  local prefix="$2"  # IN
  local tmp
  local serial
  local loop

  local preftmp="/local/vmware/tmpdir"
  if [ -n "$TMPDIR" ] && [ -d "$TMPDIR" ]; then
        tmp="$TMPDIR"
  else
        if [ -d "$preftmp" ]; then
                tmp="$preftmp"
        else
                tmp="/tmp"
        fi
  fi