Child of the Machine

I’m running a development server virtual machine on my Vista laptop using Parallels. Trouble is being on a laptop sometimes I’m on the road so a Host only network suits me, but other times I’m at home so I want the guest machine to connect to my home network. Up until now there has been A LOT of screwing around each time I leave and come just change network the network settings…

First of all I tried the obvious Internet Connection Sharing throws some “(null)” error – Google forums to read about it. Bridged networking not that I really understand how this would have helped? this but someone made mention of it… I don’t profess to being a professional at this, BUT the following configuration made my life a dream.

Now I just simply change my the Network in Parallels from “Host only networking” to “Default adapter”..

Router

• IP – 10.0.1.1
• Subnet – 255.255.0.0

Guest

• IP: 10.0.2.10
• Subnet – 255.255.0.0
• Gateway: 10.0.1.1
• DNS: 10.0.1.1

Host

Parrallels Host-Guest NIC:

• IP: 10.0.2.20
• Subnet – 255.255.255.0

Default adapter NIC:

• IP: 10.0.1.20
• Subnet – 255.255.0.0
• Gateway: 10.0.1.1
• DNS: 10.0.1.1

If anyone cares to provide more insight, or has a better solution – would love to here from you! PS. All ip addresses have been changed to protect the innocent ;)

When downloading a few Virtual Appliances I’ve found they haven’t had network connectivity ‘out of the box’. I’ve only noticed this with Ubuntu servers so far but admittedly I haven’t downloaded a lot of other flavors!

This appears to be because the MAC address for eth0 is different to the one of the creators VMware Server. Using the following command you’ll notice eth1 is seen instead:

ifconfig -a

I then just simply copied the MAC address shown and updated the MAC address listed against eth0 in /etc/iftab. Then restart the server.

The vmware-vdiskmanager.exe that comes with VMware Server can defrag and shrink your virtual drives.. But to make life easier check out these automated BAT files someones written to help out with the tasks. But remember not run this on VM’s that have snapshots!!