Thursday 8 January 2009

Wireless network bridging with VMware Server 1.0.8

I recently wrote about how to enable your wireless network adapter for use as a bridge within VMWare Server 1.0.7. See here. It was not (much) more than a week after the article that VMWare came with VMware Server 1.0.8. Since I just had my wireless working I did not dare to switch. But today I just took the chance. And guess what? The VMWare people did not read my article! Now I have to repair it again. Since there is a solution I figured that they would repair it in 1.0.8.

But fortunately I had a copy of my repaired vmnet.tar. I also backupped the original vmnet.tar from the 1.0.7 installment. It turns out that the new vmnet.tar from 1.0.8 is exactly the same in size. I placed my repaired vmnet.tar here.

Just place it as root in: /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source and run vmware-config.pl again (as always it is wise to backup your original vmnet.tar). If you then bridge vmnet2 to your wireless lan adapter, and couple one of the ethernet-adapters of your VM to vmnet2 it will work again.

And now we hope that VMWare is willing to repair this their selves in the next release.

2 comments :

madd said...

Hello,
I have been using the script provided Radu (http://radu.cotescu.com/2009/10/30/how-to-install-vmware-server-2-0-x-on-ubuntu-9-10-karmic-koala/) In hopes of solving my issues with bridging over wlan.

I’m running ubuntu 9.10 (2.6.31) on an AMD Athlon 64 Duel Core Processor with VMware Server v2.0.2 installed. My wireless card is a USB Linksys WUSBGS54.

I have not tried the vmnet.tar fix, unsure if it would work for either my kernel or version of vmware.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

~amadib

Martien van den Akker said...

Hi,

I don't think it will solve your problems. The issues with installing VMware 2.0x on a recent kernel are from an other cause.

I've ran into these problems myself with installing VMWare on OpenSuse 11.2. But decided to go back to OpenSuse 11.1 and wait for a new version of VMware that solve these issues.