Spiffed's Computing Notebook

Start VMWare ESX Server

Start your VMWare ESX Server virtual machine. When prompted by the Grub boot loader, choose the third option to enter “Service Console only”. This will start Linux, and place us at the root prompt.

Login as root (or login as another user and su to root). You should now be at the shell prompt.

Get the Kernel Modules

While you could re-compile the kernel to enable the PCNet32 module and the mii module it depends on, I’ve already gone to the trouble. Just download the tar archive containing the modules.

After downloading the tar file, we’re going to mount the tar file as the floppy image for the virtual machine. Simply open the floppy configuration window (VM —> Removable Devices —> Floppy —> Edit), open the tar file under “Use floppy image”, and ensure the device is connected.

This bit of trickery allows us to read the tar image from the /dev/fd0 device. In reality, any smaller-than-a-floppy file can be read this way.

Install the Modules

Finally, we need to execute the following commands to execute and extract the files into the modules directory.

cd /lib/modules/2.4.21-37.0.2.ELvmnix/kernel/drivers/net
tar -xvf /dev/fd0
chmod 644 pcnet32.o mii.o

To confirm they’re really there, a quick directory listing of ls -l mii.o pcnet32.o.

Reboot

Finally simply reboot to enable the modules. If you have more to do in the service console, load the mii driver then the pcnet driver with:

insmod mii
insmod pcnet