I needed a second bridged connection in VMware Workstation but kept getting the error “Cannot change network to bridged: There are no un-bridged host network adapters”.

Looks like quite a few people have had this issue too but with no resolution, apart from hitting the “Restore Default” button, which didn’t actually solve it anyway. The solution is very simple.

Open the Virtual Network Editor. The VMnet0 adapter by default will be Bridged and the external connection will be Auto-bridging. This is the problem. Change VMnet0 so that it uses a specific network interface. You can then create another bridged VMnet adapter.

Since getting my iPhone some 18 months ago, I hardly turn on my desktop PC. I can do almost anything that I need to do on my iPhone. As a result my desktop PC had fallen in to a state of ruin. Last night I decided to try to tidy it up a little.

My desktop PC started out with Ubuntu 8.04 and I’ve upgraded each time a new release came out. As a result it had accumulated a lot of crap throughout the years. So I removed X and a lot of the CLI bits and bobs that I’d installed. Stripped it back to as much of a bare metal install as possible. Then used tasksel to install Ubuntu desktop and went from there.

It’s all back up and running and I’m quite impressed with Ubuntu 10.04. I can’t talk for other distributions but Ubuntu has made massive steps in the right direction over the years. I can now plug in my iPhone 4 and Rhythmbox will pop up and allow me to play my iTunes library. And the Gwibber social client is a great replacement for TweetDeck.

It’s these simple things that will appeal to your average desktop user. Great work Ubuntu!

The patch I use against Z-Push is now on my wiki, here. It fixes several long standing bugs with Z-Push that haven’t yet made it in to SVN (will they ever?). It also adds the ability to turn debugging on/off, otherwise the debug.txt file grows beyond belief.

I’ve been using Z-Push+Dovecot with my iPhone for some time now and so far, so good. Only issue I sometimes get is when someone sends a stupidly large attachment and PHP dies as it exhausts the maximum allowed memory.

If you have any issues with my patch and need some support, best to direct it at the Z-Push forums and not me. Although feedback is always welcome.

My home server, where this is all served from, was running Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (Sarge). Sarge was first released on 6th of June, 2005. Almost a 5 year run without a reinstall. Pretty good going. Unfortunately the time had come to upgrade as I needed access to MySQL 5.1 and PHP5. I did try an upgrade from Debian 3.1 to 5.0.1 (Lenny) but this didn’t go too well. I over-looked running a hand rolled 2.4 kernel with grsecurity enable. I got in to a situation where I couldn’t run any commands at all. As I didn’t have a CDROM drive connected to the server and couldn’t be bothered taken things apart, I accepted that the installation was horribly broken and decided to bite the bullet.

To cut a long story short, I put in two new hard drives, TFTP booted Ubuntu 9.04 and started a clean install of my server. I took the opportunity to configure everything from scratch again. I didn’t fancy trying to re-use old configs and fixing them up to work with the much newer software packages that had jumped a major version or two. It’s now almost complete. Just a few things to finish off, like a hand rolled kernel with grsecurity etc.

As mentioned, one of the main reasons for the upgrade was to gain access to MySQL 5.1 and PHP5 so I could run webapps such as WordPress. My old blog which I wrote from the ground up was too cumbersome and why reinvent the wheel? I just don’t have the time anymore. So here it is.

I’ve also got DokuWiki on the go, so I can easily document specific configs. Mainly so I remember what was done and why and also to help others out there. For example, at the moment I’m writing up my Postfix+Dovecot+dspam notes as the documention I found was bitty and not very well explained.

Also to be wikified will be my High Availability Linux iSCSI cluster notes and a patch for z-push to make it work properly (specifically with the iPhone).