Setting up a VMware enviroment

The following steps describe how to get a virtual machine up and running to use for building zinc

• Get the VMplayer software installed on your machine. Ask your friendly sysadmin person to do this for you.

• Get a copy of the winxp.vmdk file (virtual machine disk format file) which describes the virtual machine you want to run. Warning: you will need more than 4G of space for this file!

• Get a copy of the winxp.vmx file which is a small executable script file that is used when starting up vmplayer.

• Start vwmplayer by typing 'vmplayer winxp.vmx'. This should boot up a virtual machine and show a login prompt for winxp

• Login using the default admin account, which has no password

• Important: For security reasons check that when you right click on the Ethernet menu at the top of your window, it is set to Host-only. We do not want to allow a connection to the internet as we would then need to install antivirus software. This has implications on how we will move data to the machine as external svn and cvs access cannot be used. We will use ssh to access the machine and scp or rsync to transfer files.

• Create a user account which matches your upi

• Log out of admin, check you can log in using your upi and then log back in as admin.

• Open up a cygwin console and type 'ipconfig' to check what ip address has been assigned to your virtual machine. Note this down.

• Create the correct password files for ssh by typing the following in a cygwin console

  mkpasswd -l> /etc/passwd
  mkgroup -l> /etc/group
  

• Your virtual machine should now be configured to allow you ssh and scp access via the ip address. Unfortunately this ip address changes occassionally so every now and then you will need to recheck to see what it is.