Help! - No Internet Connection on VM after install of AVG anti-virus

[chuckomoss]

Greetings,

I am running MacBook Pro, 2.2 Ghz, 4MG RAM, Host: OS X – 10.5.5; Guest: OS XP Pro. VMFusion 2.01 with the latest install of VM Tools; Also using NAT as my network setting.

I have been using VMFusion for 9 months and have been a big fan. I have read “Understanding Networking in VM Fusion” and the “Beginners Guide to VMFusion” and remember reading that if the Host OS has an internet connection, then the guest OS should also have an internet connection.

My issue is that today I have no internet connection for the Guest OS. What has changed is that I installed AVG 8.0 Free anti-virus yesterday and have run a few virus scans to deal with a virus I received on Wednesday from a supposed Facebook video download. After installing AVG 8.0 Free, my guest OS and internet connection worked fine for over 24 hours, but earlier today after agreeing to “heal” some infected files as part of the AVG 8.0 Free program, I can no longer connect on the guest OS.

I have tried restarting the Guest OS many times. I have shut down the guest OS and the host OS concurrently a number of times. I have disabled and enabled the "VMware Accellerated AMD PCNet" adapter a number of times. I have gone to the DOS command prompt and released and renewed the ipconfig. I even uninstalled AVG 8.0 Free and turned off my Windows firewall. None of these activities allowed me to receive an internet connection on the Guest OS, when I had a connection on the Host OS.

I do have a time machine/time capsule backup and could go to an earlier version pre-virus version if I had to.

Do you have any suggestion on how I can get my Guest VM to connect to the internet?

Thanks in advance,

Charlie

[ChargePlus]

What has changed is that I installed AVG 8.0 Free anti-virus yesterday and have run a few virus scans to deal with a virus I received on Wednesday from a supposed Facebook video download. After installing AVG 8.0 Free, my guest OS and internet connection worked fine for over 24 hours, but earlier today after agreeing to “heal” some infected files as part of the AVG 8.0 Free program, I can no longer connect on the guest OS.

Charlie

Charlie,

Check to make sure that your VM settings are are making the network accessible, and that Windows XP still sees the network.

I, too, had problems with AVG Free 8.0 running on my install. Where you are running Windows XP Pro, I have Windows 2000 installed. I uninstalled AVG, and to tried to reboot, but the VM hung. I had to force power-off the VM to recover. I suspect that AVG doesn't react well with the VMware tools, or something specific to VMware.

It's kind of odd because I have not had problems with AVG in the past, though it was on a regular Windows machine.

- John

[WoodyZ]

I would look at it this way since the Host has Network/Internet Connectivity I would do a simple test to rule out the Virtual Hardware Layer of the target Virtual Machine by booting it with a Live OS CD/DVD/ISO Image and see if it connects to the Internet. Of course you need to be sure that the Network on the Virtual Machine is Connected and I'd set it to NAT if it's not already.

A quick an easy Live OS ISO Image to use is DSL Linux (dsl-4.4.10.iso (~50MB)) and I know this particular ISO Image will boot the Virtual Machine and be able to connect to the Internet just by bringing up Firefox (Fx on the panel).

This would tell us that the Virtual Hardware at the Network Level was fine and that this is a Windows related issue.

Under the circumstances being hit with a Virus I wouldn't hesitant to delete the Virtual Machine after backing up any data not already backed up and then restore from a uninfected backup however I'd caution you about Time Machine as there have been many cases when TM didn't properly backup/restore a Virtual Machine so maybe just move the one that got hit by the virus to another folder till you're sure TM worked properly.

Note: Booting a Virtual Machine via a VD/DVD/ISO Image after the original install of an OS can be very difficult to click into the display and press the Esc key to bring up the Boot Menu to select the CD-ROM from the menu so you may need to have a look at "Boot Delay" in .

[chuckomoss]

John,

Thanks for the reply, I am not sure how to make sure VM settings are are making the network accessible. I checked network settings and see the VMware Net Adapter and it is enabled.

Here is the latest twist, after I posted this above, I realized that my Outlook 2007 CAN connect and send and receive e-mail messages but when I launch IE 7.057 it does not connect and when I launched Firefox 2.0 I received the following message, "The proxy server is refusing connections" and there was not connection to the internet either.

I ran the Diagnose Connection Problems with I.E. 7 and it came back with "Windows cannot connect to the internet using HTTP, HTTPS or FTP. This is probably caused by firewall settings on this computer. Check the fire wall settings for HTTP (port 80), HTTPS (port 443) or FTP (port 21). You may need to contact your ISP for Firewall software provider."

I am using Microsoft's Firewall.

Here is my question, how come I can send and receive Outlook e-mail messages and not connect to the internet through a browser?

Thanks again,

Charlie

[chuckomoss]

If my Outlook is able to send and receive messages on the Virtual Machine but I cannot connect through a browser on the same VM, which option would you suggest that I pursue?

Thanks,

Charlie

[WoodyZ]

Because of being hit with a virus I'd opt to restore from a backup. For me it's just not a big deal because I keep my data backup up to a point that I wouldn't hesitate to extract an know good working copy of my Virtual Machine from a compressed archive and restore my data. If I can't resolve an issue is 20 minutes to my satisfaction I restore from backup because I just don't have time to waste. My Virtual Machines are built and archived in such a way that I'm usually never down for more then an hour at most and keep on going without looking back.

[admin]

It sounds like Firefox (and perhaps IE) is set up to use a proxy (in Firefox on OS X, this setting is under Preferences > Advanced > Network > Settings. I imagine it's in an analogous place in Windows). If you didn't set this (or don't know what a proxy is), it may be the viruses fault. As Woody said, once a system is infected, you can't really trust it anymore even if you think you've cleaned out the virus.

[chuckomoss]

I restored from Monday's pre-virus Time Machine/Time Capsule VM file and both browsers and Outlook all worked fine.

I took a snapshot after the VMware Fusion and Outlook.pst restore and now I want to install a anti-virus software.

I think Norton and McAfee are way too much.

What are your thoughts on AVG vs Avast for my VM?

Thanks for your help!

[WoodyZ]

I use Avast Professional and I'm satisfied with it.