Vmware-config.pl made a mess of my network (on linux host)
ronv...@excite.com
just want to share my experiences with installing & configuring the
vmware-player on my linux box, which, I have to say, was no easy setup.
:-(
Box:
- mandriva 2006
- 1 wired nic (static, gatewayed to my router)
- 1 wireless nic (static, gatewayed to the same router)
Idea here is that when the networkcable is pluged it uses this nic to
the internet, else it uses the wireless.
Installing the player using rpm was a breeze. After this I have run
vmware-config.pl several times in order to test & improve different set
ups. Here's my experiences (under different set ups):
- vmware-config set up vmnet8 as dhcp, this would OVERWRITE my
nameserver-setting in /etc/resolve.conf every time vmnet8 was started,
thus no more dns for me. (This can be solved by hand by setting
bootproto=static for the vmnet8.
- bridged networking to my wireless card would hang the machine (rt2400
chipset & driver)
- vmware-config messed with my route-settings. This would slow down any
new network-request to the outside world terribly. 'route'-command
would just wait for 30 sec before returning a proper result. Accoring
to
http://groups.google.nl/group/comp.os.linux.networking/browse_frm/thread/62506a25fc1477f4/32c6c7bb99716129?lnk=gst&q=slow+route&rnum=3#32c6c7bb99716129
this was due to a reverse-nslookup that can not be resolved. THIS WAS
NO PROBLEM BEFORE I RUN vmware-config. Solution was to as my router-ip
to my /etc/hosts. And even with this setting I still "feel" that my
network-connections are slower then before.
Good thing is that I (needed) to learn a whole lot about linux
networking.
But the point I want to make here is that vmware-config should not be
allowed to mess around with my network-settings as they do. You can
have a tool like this completely mess/break my system around. If vmware
requires that existing network-details need to be modified they should
properly explain/document this in the releas-notes and let me do these
actions by hand so I keep control (linux is about control isn't it?)
Furthermore, running a script like vmware-config.pl during
testing/debuging like this (running it 10x in 10 minutes just to try
out different options/ideas) is a nightmare. Why doesn't vmware come up
with 1 or more config-files that you can edit to your wishes?
Well the good thing is that using vmware-prlayer from a user-experience
& performance view-point is really, really good.
I hope this post will start the VmWare engineers to re-think their
config-setup.
Cheers, Ronald