Install RHEL Packages with yum from CD/DVD

You may want to install RHEL or CentOS packages before registering with RHN or without a network connection.  You can yum install packages from the installation CD/DVD by specifying a local ISO repo.

Mount your disc or image at /mnt/cdrom and create /etc/yum.repos.d/rhel-iso.repo with the following contents:

[rhel-debuginfo]
name=Red Hat Enterprise Linux ISO
baseurl=file:///mnt/cdrom/Server
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

You should now be able to yum install your package from the CD.

Install VMware Tools on RHEL 6 & Centos 6

This is a HOWTO for installing VMware Tools on RHEL 6 and Centos 6.  I'm mainly posting this since I never remember what the prerequisites are.

Install the VMware tools prerequisites:

yum install make gcc kernel-devel kernel-headers glibc-headers perl

Mount the VMware Tools CD (after inserting it into the VM)

mkdir /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

Copy the install bundle from the CD and extract it.

cp /mnt/cdrom/VMware-Tools*.tar.gz /tmp/
cd /tmp/
tar xvfz VMwareTools*.tar.gz

Run the installer, default on all prompts works fine.

cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl  # add -d to auto accept defaults