Today I got a chance to play with Ubuntu Linux Distro.

1. The latest compatible release for ESX 4.1 is 10.04 64bits, on the download page, it says ubuntu-10.04.4-server-amd64, and there is no version for intel 64bits, it turns out the iso will also work on Intel platform.

I suspect you can of course install the latest Ubuntu 13, but you may not able to install Vmware Tools, which is very important.

2. The bare server iso does not come with a GUI, so the following steps will help you to install a nice GUI.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop –no-install-recommends

3. I noticed the security is much better and fine tuned in Ubuntu than Redhat or CentOS, as root is diabled by default completely, every time you will need to issue command ’sudo’ to start with when changing something in system configuration.

If you want to enable root ssh, then edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change the line PermitRootLogin to yes.

4. Enabling snmp is similar to CentOS, by adding rocommunity community_string mrtg.yourhost.com to /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf, but you will also need to modify /etc/default/snmpd, the line SNMPDOPTS=’-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid -c /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf’

5. To configure Ubuntu firewall, you need to install gufw, the rest is a piece of cake, same as in CentOS. In fact, you can also use ufw to block DDOS IP address.

e.g.,
sudo ufw deny proto tcp from 12.34.56.78 to any port 22

6. After deploy a vm from Ubuntu template, I found eth0 has gone missing (reminds me w2k8 VMXNET 3 issue ), eventually I found this VMware KB. Or even easier, simply delete /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules will do the trick.

7. ‘gksudo gedit /etc/hostname’ is the command to graphically edit any file, no more vi, which is very useful for many new Ubuntu or Linux users.

8. Finally regarding extending disk in Ubuntu, the method is similar, but with some twist.

9. There is a very good link for installing VMware Tools, one specific thing is you need to create a special directory ’sudo mkdir /usr/lib64′ in order to successfully install VMware Tools. Just make sure you download the latest VMware Tools (latest is 10.04) as the older one comes with ESX 4.1 (8.0.x) doesn’t work in latest Ubuntu 16.x. I also noticed VMware Tools status shows as “Unmanaged”!  That’s actually ok, as the tools is installed from an individual package instead of using the default attached CD-ROM (which the version doesn’t work anyway), so you can safely ignore it.

Update: Oct 23, 2013

It turns out even the latest release 12.04 worked perfectly on ESX4.1.

Update: Oct 28, 2015

Tested the latest 14.04 also worked perfectly on ESX4.1.

Update: Nov 14, 2016

Tested the latest 16.04 also worked perfectly on ESX4.1.