Installing Midgard on a virtual server

Mon 13th December 2004 23:40 EET

Today I had the privilege to install Midgard on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 running on a VMWare virtual server. The hardware platform itself was a heady-duty, multi-CPU monster by Dell.

I've some very limited experience with the VMWare desktop products (Windows on Red Hat), but that was nothing compared to the show I witnessed today. I had the four RHEL3 CD iso images on a virtual CD-ROM drive, courtesy of the client's IT guys, and my task was to click through the installation and proceed with the Midgard installation itself. OK, this will take the whole three hours I had time scheduled, I thought - the whole RHEL3 was installed in no more than 15 minutes!

With the Midgard RPMs compiled by Daniel, I had a Midgard installation done in just 30 minutes - sweeeeeeet. Only thing that had to be upgraded was the MySQL packages (RHEL3 comes with the 3.x series). I really wanted the query cacheing provided by the 4.x series. There was also some really strange stuff going around during the database installation (MultiLang, UTF-8), but I'll get back to that after more investigations.

Despite the fact that I'm not working for a hosting service provider or an ISP, the day's experience has restored my trust to the virtual machines. They are finally reaching the point where they really pay themselves back too - at least the IT guys were really all about it, and trust me, they know what they're doing and what they require from their equipment (be it hardware or software).

Update 2004-12-21

Despite the fact that the installation was actually very successful, it was missing a mission-critical part - the NTLM authentication. Here's some tips to get NTLM authenticated Midgard running on RHEL3.