Using Minix on VMWare

• There is nothing special that you need to do incase you need to run Minix on VMWare. Infact, you can download the VMWare ready image of Minix from here. Only, this image is not allowing ftp access to VMWare. After much effort, I found an image file for Minix 2.0.4 which was consolidated. The website is so confusing. It does not specify clearly what needs to be downloaded and they have lots of things there too!!!
• To allow ping to work, just set up NAT as described here.
• Read this post or this post to enable FTP and Telnet access to Minix.
  

VMWare : SSH access to RH9 from Windows using PuTTY

Refer to my previous post regarding setting up Internet access via RH9 Guest OS. Make sure you have similar settings. Then, just change the firewall settings to allow incoming SSH connections.

Nothing else needs to be done.

VMWare : Internet access from Guest VM (RedHat 9)

• You donot need to create any internet sharing in windows etc. VMWare will take care of that for you.
• To set up internet access from the guest VM, set the VM to use NAT for ethernet.
• Set the IP address to the same segment as that of VMNet8. (just make sure that it is not .2).

Now you can access the Internet from the Guest VM!

VMWare : Do's & Donts

• VMWare by default creates two Vitual Network Adapters: VMNet1 & VMNet8.
• VMNet1 is useful for host-only connection.
• VMNet8 is for NAT access.
• Donot change the IP domains which are assigned by default. You could wreck the DHCP, DNS & Routing domian that VMWare creates.
• To change these settings, please use: Edit > Virtual Network Settings > NAT.
• By default, the IP Address .2 with the VMNet8 segment, is the IP address of VMWare's DNS & router.

VMWare : Internet / FTP / Telnet Access to Linux Guest from Windows Host

1) After installing VMWare workstation or VMWare Player, find out the IP Subnet of the VM Network Adapter named VMNet8. This is the VMAdapter that is used for NAT connectivity.
2) Set up the Linux host's IP address to be in the same IP Subnet as VMNet8. Just make sure that you donot use the IP addresses subnet.1 OR subnet.2 Subnet.1 is used by VMNet8 while subnet.2 is used as the IP of the NAT Gateway. (Refer to VMWorkstation documentation for more details).
4) Set the default Gateway to subnet.2
3) Set up VMWare to use Ethernet in NAT mode.
4) Done.

VMWare : Sharing Files by Connecting to Windows from Linux

Check out this link from VMWare Documentation: http://www.vmware.com/support/gsx3/doc/running_fileshare_lin2win_gsx.html#1089626

Minix - FTP & Tlenet Access

I had a problem accessing my Minix VMWare guest OS, via FTP or Telnet. Here is how the problem was solved...

A little bit of history:
Yesterday, I had to set up a RedHat 9 Guest OS for one of my faculty members. I realized that even though telnet was installed and running, I was unable to access it even locally!!! Then I realized that I had to edit the 'telnet' file in /etc/xinetd.d to allow incoming telnet connections (inspite of changes to the firewall configuration to allow incoming telnet connections).

Back to present:
So I realized that perhaps something similar needs to be done even with Minix (after all, it is a variant of Unix and must have similar security features!!!). But, when I went to the /etc folder in Minix, I found no xinetd.d folder. Looking around, I found the serv.access file. Guessing that it must be the right place to look, I opened it. Bingo!
There it was. Only, I had to decipher how the entires should look like in that file. Ever so helpful, a comment asked me to man serv.access. Also, I looked at the /usr/adm/log file. It was all there - all those access denied messages...

Initially, my /etc/serv.access file was like this:

# /etc/serv.access
# 2006-05-21
# See the serv.access(5) man pages to learn how to edit this file
# to make your system safe on the network.
# this is insecure! replace with something more specific asap
telnet ftp: +* log;

# this is better, keep outsiders out

# telnet ftp: +*.local log;

# this records all unsuccessful access attempts in/usr/adm/log

*: -* log;

After a reading the man page and a little tinkering, I changed the line "telnet ftp: +* log;" to "telnet ftp: + log;". i.e., I just removed the *. May be very insecure, but it does the job for me. Perhaps one could add an IP address or a range of IPs to enhance security (as described in the man page).

One another word:
This might be very helpful on the VMWare front:

I am still using NAT. I had to just set the IP address of my Minix to be on the same subnet as VMNet8 (which is the default subnet on which VMWare does NAT-ing). Also, the default gateway on the guest OS - Minix - had to be set to VMNet8-subnet-.2 ( The .2 IP is the gateway across which VMWare does NAT).

Thats it!!!. All works fine now...