MacLochlainns Weblog

Occasionally, my students loose their network connection when copying their virtual machines. This article shows you how to rebuild your Internet connection.

The first step requires you to identify the port number on your host operating system, which is typically Windows OS or Mac OS X. You can find that by running the following search from a Mac OS X Terminal session or Windows OS Command session.

If you’re on the Mac OS X, you launch a Terminal session and then use the sudo command to open a shell as the root super user, like this:

sudo sh

As the root super user on Mac OS X , you run the netstat command like this:

sh-3.2# netstat -a | grep 1.ntp | grep -v grep
udp4       0      0  192.168.147.1.ntp      *.*

VMware uses the same subdomain with one difference for the gateway, it uses node 2:

192.168.147.2

The alternate syntax to find Vmware’s subdomain requires you to use an Administrator account on Windows, like this:

C:\> netstat -a | findstr /C:.ntp

After you determine the subdomain, you need to ensure VMware is configured correctly. You navigate to the menu and choose Virtual Machine and then Settings from the dropdown menu. The software shows you the following:

Then, click on the Network Adapter under the Removable Devices, and you see the following screen:

You need to make sure that you’re using Internet Sharing, or Share with my Mac. If you’re not using it select it now.

Launch the hosted Linux OS and open a Terminal seesion. Inside the Terminal, you should find the machine’s address as the root address with the ifconfig utility. The technique follows:

[student@localhost ~]$ sudo sh
[sudo] password for student: 
sh-4.2# ifconfig
eno16777736: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        ether 00:0c:29:70:77:64  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 34  bytes 4190 (4.0 KiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0
 
lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING>  mtu 65536
        inet 127.0.0.1  netmask 255.0.0.0
        inet6 ::1  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x10<host>
        loop  txqueuelen 0  (Local Loopback)
        RX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

Next, you need to edit some files, they assume the VMware Network Gateway is 192.168.147.2 and the machine’s address is “00:0c:29:70:77:64“. The first file you need to edit is the /etc/resolv.conf file, and it should look like this:

domain localdomain
search localdomain
nameserver 192.168.147.2

The second file you need to edit is the /etc/sysconfig/network file. It should look like this:

# Created by anaconda
NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=localhost.localdomain
GATEWAY=192.168.147.2

The third file you need to edit is the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file. It should look like this:

DEVICE=eth0
HWADDR=00:0c:29:70:77:64
ONBOOT=yes
NM_CONTROLLED=yes
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
TYPE=Ethernet
DNS1=192.168.147.2
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=yes
IPV6INIT=no

The last step requires that you reboot the machine or run the /etc/rc.d/init.d/network to restart the network. I hope this helps those trying to restore their VMware hosted operating systems network connection.