[clug-talk] vmware bridged network woes (resend)

[John Clarke]

Gustin Johnson wrote:
> Greg King wrote:
>> I recently applied updates to my Ubuntu 9.04 system and as usual had
>> to reconfigure VMware. The /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl script completed
>> normally (after some dicking around), and I can log into the vmware
>> console and start VMs, but they all have difficulty using the
>> bridged network (which worked before the updates). There are all set
>> to "connect at power on" but the guest OS says no link, and vmware
>> console has this event "Message from HAL: The network bridge on
>> device vmnet0 is not running. The virtual machine will not be able to
>> communicate with the host or with other machines on your network.
>> Failed to connect virtual device Ethernet1. " This message is in
>> contradiction to the diagnostic message below that "Bridged
>> networking on /dev/vmnet0 is running".
>>
> I did not see what version of VMWare this is, but in the past on some of
> their products I have had to delete and then recreate some of the
> network interfaces in the VM hardware setup (usually the VM has to be in
> a powered off state).
>
> You may be able to get away with "sudo /etc/init.d/vmware restart" or
> you may need to reboot if the Ubuntu updates installed a new kernel (you
> will likely have to run the vmware-config.pl script again).
>
>> I've googled around and don't see an obvious solution. Everything
>> appears to be working normally as the following diagnostics show:
>
> The vmnet module is a good start. Try removing the kernel module (sudo
> rmmod vmnet) and then modprobing it, see if there are any interesting
> details in syslog.
>
>> If anyone has seen this before or better yet has a resolution, I'd be
>> very thankful.
>
> Over the past 10 years I have seen a wide variety of issues with VMWare.
> What is worrying is that I have more problems now than 5 years ago, and
> many of their products that I have in production (vmware server) only
> run reliably on older distros, like Ubuntu 8.04. I can only hope that
> by the time 8.04 is out of support that alternatives have become capable
> enough or somehow the laws of the Universe reverse and VMWare chooses to
> play nice with the kernel developers... I am not holding my breath.

I wonder whether in time as os's offer a built-in vm, vmware may evolve 
into a niche product. For eg. RHEL now offers kvm (about a year ago 
Redhat replaced support for xen with kvm, possibly because Citrix 
acquired zensource and is apparently close with MS - say in the same way 
Novell with SuSE is playing nice with MS)

BTW for hands-on learning kvm I found this 
http://www.telecom-lille1.eu/people/landru/viminal/index-en.html#vodka-lab. 
The lab explains with clear hands on lessons COW (copy on write) file 
images, network bridging and other mysteries.

These folks offer liveDVD 'learning lab environment' for ipv6, 
networking, kerberos authentication, with ldap and snmp labs in the works.

It seems Telecom Lille is a French technical university. But these labs 
include superb English documentation for us not so bilingual types.

John

>
> <snip>
>
> Hth,
> __
> G
>
>
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