/dev/blog0

While in the process of pre-staging a consolidation of my servers to one hefty VMware server( instead of multiple machines idling at 80 to 250 watts each) I realized that I could begin the building, patching and installing process on my laptop because one of the coolest features of VMware is that you can move the guest OS from computer to computer and power them up, they never know the difference.

In starting the build process I ran into a snag with Debian Lenny. The symlinked gcc version is 4.3 and VMware Tools was complaining that since the kernel was compiled with 4.1, I should use that instead. It suggested I create a variable and assign it the path to gcc-4.1. Ran into some problems doing this and eventually discovered that sudo strips most environmental variables before it executes the program you want to run. So the variable ‘CC’ was getting removed before the vmware tools script was run.

Work arounds

- Include changing the symlink for /usr/bin/gcc to /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 for the build process and then back to 4.2 (Quick Fix)
- Going into root to add the variable and then installing the (Easiest)
- Adding ‘CC’ to the allowable variables in sudo and/or disabling ‘env_reset’ in the options (Opens potential holes for users to exploit).

I also found that a lot of people were having the same issue as me and posted a reply on another blog about what I found