vmware networking solution: vnet vs nat

[mojavelinux]

Originally, this post was going to be entitled "vmware networking
problem", but before I got to writing the post, I solved it.  I want to
share my finding here in case they are of use to someone.



Problem:



I installed Windows XP Pro on vmware-player running on Ubuntu 6.06
using the instructions from this forum and elsewhere.  Windows was
running great, however I was having some very strange network problems.
The most pressing issue was the inability to access a large set of
websites.  I could access google.com, starbucks.com and basecamphq.com
(to name a few), but could not access yahoo.com, sourceforge.net,
adobe.com (to name a few).  I have no idea why some work and some
don't.  The problem doesn't have to do with  bad DNS cache because I
can ping them all.  It just seems that the data is not being pulled
properly.  The other problem was the lack of network if linux was
connected via wireless (eth1) rather than wired (eth0).



State:



My original configuration in the WindowsXPPro.vmx file regarding the
ethernet was:



ethernet0.present = "TRUE"

ethernet0.vnet = "vmnet1"

ethernet0.addressType = "generated"

ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:ae:92:7e"

ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"



Solution:



It's all in the hand you play, regardless of how few cards you have. 
Fixing the issue came down to disabling the "vnet" and enabling "nat". 
The difference is that with vnet, the guest system will grab a new IP
address from the router and show up as a seperate computer in the
network, whereas nat will piggy back on the host's connection.  In my
case, this is exactly what I wanted since I am constantly switching
between wired and wireless and don't want the guest to care how I am
connected.



My new configuration looks like:



ethernet0.present = "TRUE"

ethernet0.connectionType = "nat"

ethernet0.addressType = "generated"

ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:ae:92:7e"

ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"



I will leave it up to the discussion in this thread to figure out what
the heck is going wrong with the vnet connection.


-- 
mojavelinux