vmware - lost in a fog of ambiguity

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sun, 12 Mar 2006, Matthew Saltzman wrote:

> On Sun, 12 Mar 2006, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>
>> <posted & mailed>
>> 
>> Gawain Lynch wrote:
>> 
>>> On Sun, 2006-03-12 at 12:57 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>>>> I just acquired a very nice if old ThinkPad running vmware (player),
>>>> which I have heard a lot about but never tried before.
>>>> I'm quite impressed with it,
>>>> but have been completely unable after a day reading vmware documentation
>>>> to get my WiFi card working.
>>> 
>>> WiFi only works (at least it used to) with NAT.
>> 
>> Well, I sort of assumed that the internal network on 172.16.250.0 -
>> an IP address assigned by vmware, not me - _is_ using NAT;
>> but where do I tell vmware I want the packets to go out via eth0 ?
>
> AFAIK, the VMware network devices just find the active interface and use it. 
> After starting the vmware service, route -n shows the following:
>
> # route -n
> Kernel IP routing table
> Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
> 192.168.20.0    0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 
> vmnet8
> 192.168.30.0    0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 
> vmnet1
> 192.168.10.0    0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
> 0.0.0.0         192.168.10.2    0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0
>
> The 20 subnet is VMware's NAT, and the 30 subnet is VMware's hostonly. The 10 
> subnet is my physical LAN.  You'll note that the two vmnet devices use the 
> default gateway 0.0.0.0, and 0.0.0.0 in turn uses my local router at 
> 192.168.10.2.  I did not have to specify anything in vmware-config.pl to make 
> that happen.

Folowing myself up: VMware runs its own dhcp server for the vmnet 
interfaces.  See /etc/vmware/ for the config files (created by 
vmware-config.pl).

>
>> 
>> The vmware documentation reminds me of CUPS.
>> I'm pretty sure both were written by aliens.
>
> Like too much documentation, they were written for the developer's peers, not 
> us mere users.
>
> Have you read the Linux Network Administrator's Guide 
> (http://www.tldp.org/guides.html)?  After spending some time with that, I 
> found that networking made a lot more sense.
>
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs