Can OS X use VPN established in guest

[anewby]

I have a standard OS X (10.4.10) / VMware Fusion (1.0 (51348)) setup. OS X is main environment and I use XP as a guest for various corporate applications that are Windows only. (Currently I use NAT on the guest as configured out of the box.)

Here's the challenge: Corporate VPN can only be established from Internet Explorer and I have no problem getting the VPN tunnel up and running in the guest. What I want to be able to do is get OS X to be able to run through that VPN connection when I'm not in the office. So, i think I want to network backwards and have OS X go through the guest, not the other way around. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Adrian

[admin]

The general idea would be to add up a host-only network (so the guest has both bridged and host-only), disable VMware's DHCP server, and set up a DHCP server in the guest. I haven't actually tried doing this, so I'm not sure if it'll work. DaveP has done a bunch of work with Fusion's network scripts, so hopefully he can chime in.

[rcardona2k]

You can bypass DHCP on the host-only network by setting the VM's secondary interface to a static address and pick an address on the same subnet as the host's vmnet8 interface. This works well. If you have a proxy and/or port-forwarding services in the guest OS, OS X apps can connect to them over the Guest's host-only address through the VPN.

[kipkerplunk]

I'd like to do exactly the same thing, but unfortunately I'm rather new to VMware (Fusion 1.1 beta). Could someone provide a step-by-step or perhaps more detail on how to do this?

Thanks for patience/help!

clint

[anewby]

I came up with a fairly non-technical resolution.

I bought my network guy enough beer to persuade him to extend the VPN rules (Juniper) to allow connection from OS X clients. The rule was absurdly simple: If browser OS = OS X, test for presence of a certain file in root directory of filesystem.

Now, I just set up the VPN tunnel in OS X and the WinXP guest piggybacks on it just fine. Interestingly, the Juniper software that establishes the VPN only works in Safari, not Firefox.

Adrian