Hi,
We have recently setup the Dokuwiki 1.1 Jumpbox on VMware workstation 6.0 and everything was fine on the test system where we had it installed; it gets an address and is accessible and serves the pages we created on it very nicely.
We have a customer who wants to use Dokuwiki as a wiki for their sales people to use for cataloging customer concerns and as a place to leave notes for requested tech support issues. We have VMware running on their server so I took my Dokuwiki VM with its contents over and installed it on their server so that they could see how well it worked...
But it didn't work at all. It doesn't seem to get an ipaddress because there are not network cards recognized as eth0. The admin screen does not list an ipaddress and when you attempt to add a static ip it says that its not a good ip address. So in an effort to figure out what the problem was I switched to the root screen and logged in as admin. After a little checking I found the problem which is that ifconfig doesn't even list an ethernet interface, although dmesg shows both pcnet32 and vmxnet loading at boot.
Is this (not running on any vmware installation except the one where it was first initialized) a "feature" of the unregistered version... if it is it would really be nice to know because now our customer thinks we were blowing smoke up their pant legs when we told them that Jumpbox is way cool (as well as safe and portable).
It was not a total loss because I have Dokuwiki running on my notebook for another project which they thought was interesting, but it is a real problem to have a virtual machine that doesn't act like a virtual machine (ie will only run on one pc and craps out when restored anywhere else.)
This may be because VMware is changing the mac address everytime it is moved to a different machine without even asking. I have also noticed that VMware complains that logging is turned off when ever we startup.
We have our own ubuntu server vm's and dokuwiki installed just to see if it works any differently. I did notice that with 8.04 changing the mac address yields eth1 instead of eth0 and you have to go bash it a good one to get it to agree that its eth0 again... but it doesn't disappear the ethernet altogether.
Any ideas ?
Additional information
Hi,
Thanks for the response. We have confirmed that this is a problem on all versions of vmware we could test and seems to relate to the new feature in Ubuntu 8.04 which links specific mac addresses to logical ethernet names such as eth0 or eth1. This has been a problem for us moving VM's that we created between host machines especially if you allow it to create a new instance (ie it gives the vm a new mac address)
What we also determined is that the previous 1.04 version of the dokuwiki jumpbox does not have this problem.
For testing we moved the 1.1 VM between workstation and workstation, workstation and server, workstation and vmware player and anytime it generates a new mac address it fails (and since it always generates a new mac address by default it fails a lot :-) If we hack the vmx file to eliminate the mac address change it works fine in all places where we tested.
Our pitch to our customers is that an investment in a virtual machine is an investment in flexible infrastucture where (as long as backups are made) you can move your VM's to other hardware and be up and running again with no problem. Having to create a new instance and restore the jumpbox backups is pretty technical for most of our users. They would much prefer to have a program which backs up the VM itself to another server and where they can light it up instantly if there is a problem with the main server. So that is what we were able to do with the 1.04 release and what we hoped to do with 1.1
I just want to say that we really think this is a great idea and we are trying to place these appliances with our customers to generate revenue for you when they like them enough to register them. In order to do that we need pretty flawless execution. I rebuilt the customers wiki on the 1.04 version and they are happily testing it. So far they are very impressed and a big selling point was that I could take it to another pc with only the player installed and have it running again in less than 5 minutes.
Thanks again and let me know if there is any other information we can provide.
Thanks
Thanks for the info, I just opened a bug for this.
This is not intentional
This is definitely not intentional it's more likely a bug of some type. However, we don't generally recommend moving full virtual machines like that as there are weird issues that crop up at times, even when staying with the same virtualization platform, as you discovered. We generally recommend using the JumpBox backup system to move the installation to a fresh JumpBox instance. That said, what you did should have worked since you were moving between VMWare products so there's likely some other issue at play at the VMWare level that I'm unaware of. You moved if from VMWare Workstation to VMWare server correct?