LinLog

Does anybody know how to change the network adapter that VMware Player bridges to?

I haven't used VMware in a while, but when I fired it up the other day, the network bridging just plain didn't work. This struck me as weird, because it used to work.

After some futile web searches, I eventually grepped around /proc and discovered /proc/vmnet/bridge0, which indicated that the network bridge was going to eth0. This explained the lack of connectivity, as eth0 is my unplugged ethernet card. I wanted it to go to ra0, my WiFi card. However, rerunning vmware-config-network.pl didn't seem to do anything. In fact, I couldn't even get it to ask me what device to use.

I could be way off track here, but I suspect this has something to do with the fact that I'm using the pre-built VMware kernel modules from the Ubuntu repositories. I almost think the device to bridge to is configured at compile time and built directly into the modules. If that's the case, that kind of sucks.

At least the NAT networking is fine, so at least I've got something. On the down side, it's a little inconvenient. Since VMware Player doesn't have shared directory support, I need to go through the network to access my file shares. Accessing the localhost from a NATed VM doesn't work so well. I can still mount my local shares on a remote host and go through a share on that host to get the data, but that's, er, just this side of crazy.