vmware - lost in a fog of ambiguity

[Matthew Saltzman]

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.

>
> 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