Has anyone used an 'off the shelf' vm-based mail server like rPath before?

It's the only bit of my setup which is a PITA to move between machines.

No, but I use Xmail, which is very easy to move from machine to machine. It's more or less just tar the MailRoot folder and copy it to the next machine and untar it.

Stig

Odd that you suggested this, this is 50% of what i want (The other 50% is a Cyrus server with some management gui in a vm)

I think I may take Spamvigilante instead tho.

Yes, a management GUI would be very useful too.

I've decided to just 'roll my own', bittorrenting a vanilla gentoo vm overnight and will just build a copy of my current setup, I can then move it around as I shuffle machines.

On a related note, as my newly created vm will have a virtual net adaptor, any pointers on what MAC address I should assign it? I assume as long as it doesn't clash with anything on my local subnet I should be fine as it's only my local router and switch that will need it?

Your VM will already have a MAC address, no need for you to make one up. Of course I'm assuming your using Workstation or server, hacking around with Player may be different.

So say I ran several VMs in one machine, they'd each need a MAC address. How would it sort that?

From the VMware KB:
http://www.vmware.com/support/esx21/doc/esx21admin_MACaddress.html
This is for the ESX 2.1 product - they are currently shipping 3.0.1.

MAC Generator for VMware ESX
http://www.vmguru.com/files/10/tools/entry15.aspx
It's not perfect though: http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=323680

The different MAC ranges registered to VMware:
00-05-69-xx-xx-xx
00-0C-29-xx-xx-xx
00-50-56-xx-xx-xx

It seem that when the VM is powered on that the VMware software will generate a random MAC address if none currently exists. If your VM gets moved to a different host it's MAC address may be changed by the VMware software to prevent a conflict with a VM already powered on on that machine.

Personally I've never manually generated a MAC address, and I've run at time 50 VMs on one machine - I let the software do the work. Having said that I've never had an application that was MAC address dependent.

Any idea why I can't connect to my new linux VM server from a windows client?

Keep getting the following error:

Login [username/password] incorrect

I've tried every user account on the machine including root.

Sorry Andy, no idea.
Work this issue as you would if it was a physical server, there is nothing different/special about VMs when connecting to them.

Solved.... pesky PAM module not configured correctly. It was actually stopping me from logging into the vmware console itself, didn't get as far as actually starting any VM's..... all sorted now.