Vista "Unidentified Network" Issue

[defect]

There is an issue with VMware Workstation's network adapters in that they are placed in the 'unidentified network' location which by default is a 'public location'. If any network location in Vista is public then the public location firewall rules apply (currently for me that means non discoverable etc).

The unidentified network location can be manually changed to private but this setting does not persist between host reboots (I believe this is by-design).

I would think that the Vmware adapters should be placed in a different location to prevent this problem but I'm not sure why Vista is identifying (or should I say failing to identify) the adapters. I'm attempted to set the IP addresses manually for both adapters as well as adding a gateway (the same IP) as I've heard this might help in getting identification to work but the settings get forced by (presumably by VMware) each time (strangely enough the forced IPv4 properties for both adapters is blank).

Can someone shed some light on this issue - I'm surprised there aren't any other posts there about this as it's a bit frustratiing (being forced to run in public location mode).

[CiscoKid]

I too have confirmed that this issue exists and had this issue resolved prior to Vista SP1 by adding the default gateway to the VMNET1 and VMNET8 interfaces. What is the strange thing is that the gateways remain in the registry and the advanced configuration for these adapters, but they do not hold in the general configuration causing them to be labeled as "Unidentified Networks." Anyone use the netsh command to resolve this issue? I would be curious to see if anyone had better luck using that method rather than previous methods. Thanks.

[richv]

So are you saying that I should just assign a default gateway for the VMWare adapater in Vista's Network And Sharing Center? Would that be the same gateway as my normal adapters? Sorry, not much network theory...

[ejobrien]

The problem is that the gateway IP has to be in the same sub-net. It wont work for example just using the IP address of your router, as the sub-net will obviously be different.

[richv]

So then, I could correctly assume that the gateway for 192.168.153.x would be 192.168.153.1?

[CiscoKid]

To simplify things, if VMware Workstation assigns 192.168.153.1 as the IP address for either your VMNET1 or VMNET8 adapter, assign the same IP address as the gateway IP. Keep in mind this worked successfully prior to Vista SP1 SP1 broke this fix.

[ejobrien]

I just tried using netsh to assign the gateway IP, without any luck. I tried the command...

netsh interface ip set address "VMWare Network Adapter VMnet1" static 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1

Which in theory should assign a gateway IP address 192.168.1.1, however when I checked it with "ipconfig", the gateway IP was 0.0.0.0

Eugene

[richv]

Thanks CiscoKid... The information is appreciated...

[WesleyWex]

I've also resolved this before installing SP1 and now all is messed up. One thing I've noticed is the output of the ipconfig /all command:

Ethernet adapter VMnet 1:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :

Description . . . . . . . . . . . : VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter for VMnet

1

Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : -

DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No

Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes

IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 10.10.10.12(Preferred)

Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0

Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 0.0.0.0

10.10.10.2

DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.10.10.2

NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled

As you can see there is a 0.0.0.0 default gateway, which is not on the configuration of this adapter (not even on the advanced window).

[Chrisoldinho]

Really irritating this!

Since sharing gets disabled my Xbox 360/PS3 no longer can play music via the Media Connect function built into XP/Vista.

My fix for the moment is to simply disable the adaptors when I am not using them using a batch script that I double click on my desktop and vice versa when I want to use VMWare.

If there was a way to incorperate this batch script into VMWare so that it was disabled all the time, and then only run when the machine was booting & run again on exit it would fix the issue for me as it's an enable/disable option i've created.

I appreciate that we shouldn't have to do this, VMWare sort it out!!!!

[WesleyWex]

Interesting fact!

Accidentally discovered: port forwarding works even with the network adapter disabled!

I was accessing my apache normally from another computer, and it worked. Suddenly I remembered: HEY! the network adapter is still off!

The virtual machine IP is 10.10.10.10 here, if I access it, I get an error from the browser, but if I forward port 80 to my 80, localhost gives me the vm!

There is only one thing I can't seem to get to work: samba, because it conflicts with windows itself...

It's very sad to hear that this is an year-old issue...

[CiscoKid]

Wow WesleyWex, you may have discovered a huge security breach with VMware's Workstation. VMware...you may want to revisit this one. Anyone else confirm the same behavior?

[Zenrin]

I believe that I have fixed this finally. It's been so irritating. What I did was I changed both interfaces to use dhcp under Vista. I then modified the vmnetdhcp.conf file in the \Users\All Users\VMware directory to point the host interface default route to the .254 address (default dhcp server address). This forces windows to go into Local Only mode as that IP doesn't route anywhere. Other things I did that may have helped before this worked was I changed the domain-name from local to vmnetX.internal. You may be able to accomplish the same thing by using .254 for the gateway address instead of modifying DHCP, but I haven't tried that.

My config file is attached for reference. :smileycool:

Message was edited by: Zenrin - Removed config file text and attached it instead as it was reformatted.

[WesleyWex]

I was hoping this resolved my issue but I guess this will only work if SP1 is not installed.

I've followed it, tried 10.10.10.254, 10.10.10.200 and 10.10.10.2 (my network is 10.10.10.0 as you may notice... hehe), but nothing worked to un-unidentify my VMnet8... I guess I'll have to live with disabling all vm interfaces and access the VM by the forwarded ports...

[Zenrin]

Non-SP1 worked for me by setting the default gateway address to the same as the interface address as described earlier in this thread. The bottom line appears that the network has to appear to Vista as Local only, or at least non-internet accessible. I only have IPV4, File and Printer Sharing, and Client for Microsoft networks enabled for these adapters. I've turned off VMware Bridge, IPv^ and Link-Layer Topology Discovery options. I also unchecked the Register this connections... in the DNS tab of advanced options.

[WesleyWex]

I'm not a network expert, just a developer. I wonder what is making vista tag the network as unidentified if it behaves exactly like a normal network (with DHCP and Gateway working) if the previous version worked well...

[simdoc]

I opened a support incident on this case with VMWare for Vista with SP1. They basically acted as if they were totally unaware of this issue (even the issues with pre-SP1---don't they try to use their own product and read their own communities?)!!!!

They basically told us that they could do nothing to get around this issue. They want US (not them) to check with Microsoft to see if there is a way to get the pre-SP1 behavior in post-SP1. I thought this was their product. Why should I waste my time on fixing their problems? Haven't we already wasted enough of our time.

I think that VMWare needs to stop stating that VMWare Workstation 6.0 is Vista compatible with this problem. It is not very useful in this state as it imposes far too many network restrictions.

[WesleyWex]

This is just ridiculous... I've called Microsoft support a few weeks ago about this and they said to me that they could not help me with this issue because they cannot reproduce the scenario there, of course, they can only solve problems if they see what's going on there too.

VMware should contact Microsoft and ask what causes SP1 to tag a network unidintified, and then solve it.

If we could solve this ourselves we would be hacking VMware's code... hehe

[richv]

I just love being stuck between two software companies like this and no one seems to want to resolve the actual problem! VMWare... Talk to Microsoft! Microsoft, talk to VMWare!

[richv]

Just submitted another support request for this... Anyone else want to submit a support request! Maybe if we make enough noise, they will hear that this is an issue and we can move forward!

[CiscoKid]

I downloaded the 6.5 beta for Workstation and sorry all...problem still exists in 6.5.