Weird email from VMware – 378 days old

[peterb]

Just to let you know, I recently received an email from VMware advising me that my account has been merged with another account as per my request:

"Dear VMware Customer,
Your request to merge account .......................... into account ........................... completed successfully. As a result of the merge, you will see the following changes to your access:

• Once you log into the VMware portal, you will see a new account that you will have access to, and your initial account will no longer be accessible
• Your Home folder, all subsequent folders, and all licenses will now be placed at a sub-folder under the new account's Home folder.
• If you had any Folder permissions, you will retain those permissions
• You will be no longer retain any Global permissions that you had
• The Super User and Procurement Contact of your account will be assigned all folder permissions at that folder.
• Your Account Activities page will now be displayed in this Account's Activities page."

I never requested this merger of accounts. I contacted VMware support. They called me today and advised me that during their update of their database they experienced a "glitch" in their accounts. For those using VMware you may want to log in to your account to make sure that the same didn't happen to you.

[Grogan]

Do you use some sort of cloud service with VMware? (some of those bulleted points seem to be related to that)

As far as the software goes, I got pissed off at VMware for their poor (selective) Linux support and switched to VirtualBox (Free), which got better than VMware Workstation ever was, in a very short time.

At first, at VMware, while they didn't "officially" support this and that, there was an employee named Petr who unofficially supplied patches and workarounds to make it compatible with newer kernels. I was doing just fine for years until that stopped, and I wound up with a new upgrade that wouldn't even install. A new graphical installer that could do nothing but give me a completely idiotic and misleading error message that had nothing to do with the problem. My forum posts were unanswered, except for the usual righteous mouthpieces telling me I was not using a "supported system". So I fixed my problem by switching to VirtualBox, where there is no whining about supported distributions and kernel versions.

[peterb]

Hi Grogan:

No I don't use any form of cloud service nor did I sign up for such. It seems that they obviously screwed up. I had used Virtual Box but have to admit that I got too frustrated figuring out how to share files between the host and guest which led me to back to VMware. It looks like that Petr dude was a big loss for them.

[Grogan]

He was still there (at the time) but probably no longer allowed to spend time doing that. That's why I dropped them like a wet sack of liquishit, if Linux operability isn't important enough to them. It's not Windows and one size doesn't fit all. Sorry guys, code needs to compile for the system's kernel.

VirtualBox shared folders works way better than VMware's (at the time anyway... haven't seen it in a few years now. VMware's folder sharing used to be about as fast as a network transfer). You share the folder through VirtualBox's Shared Folder setting on the host, then access it through a network share on a windows guest, or mount it on a linux guest (mount -t vboxsf sharename mountpoint). Guest Additions required for the shared folder driver.

[Dark Angel]

File sharing in VirtualBox isn't all that hard, though I suppose I've been doing it for some time so I could easily be biased. If you want help with it just ask, there's more than enough people here happy to help.

[peterb]

Thanks Mike and Mick!! I'll setup virtual box in the next couple of days and you'll probably hear from me.