This post is for preservation, because just about the time I forget the steps is the time I need to reinstall VMWare Tools on an Ubuntu Guest on an ESXi Host.

1. sudo -i
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get upgrade
4. apt-get install build-essential binutils linux-headers-$(uname -r)
5. mount /dev/scd0 /cdrom
6. cp -a /cdrom/VMwareTools* /tmp/
7. cd /tmp/
8. tar -vxzf VMwareTools*.gz
9. cd vmware-tools-distrib/
10. ./vmware-install.pl

CD-ROM mount point may vary. Accept all defaults for vmware-install perl script.

I don’t fall asleep easily when I’m on-call so I decided I’d watch Dexter Season 2. I didn’t want to download 4.1GBs of xvid/avi’s from my parents house to my place because it’s entirely unnecessary to have the videos in two places. So, let me explain how I got a Streaming Media daemon working on my server.

I did some searching and there wasn’t anything super awesome out there that would keep me away from using the command line interface of VLC. So, the first step was to install vlc. I also use screen so I can log out of my SSH session and just use the web interface available on VLC, so I’ll include steps for using screen.

sudo apt-get install vlc screen

During or after installing vlc, you might as well set up the port forwarding on your router for access to the web interface. Log into your router and open up port 8080 to your server. If you are not trying to stream over the internet or don’t have a persistant dynamic or static IP address, you can skip this step. Check http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm for information on how to port forward on your router. (more…)