How can I turn off VMware virtual ethernet adapter traffic when Player is not running?

[faustie]

VMware newbie here. I've recently installed VMware Player 2.5.1 on XP SP3.

Like many others in these forums, I am bothered by all the services left running when Player is not running: VMware NAT Service; VMware VMnet DHCP service; and VMware Authorization Service.

I am also bothered by all the network traffic that VMware's virtual ethernet adapters (VMnet1 and VMnet8) keep sending out when the Player is not running. Most of this traffic is NetBIOS (ports 137 & 138) UDP broadcasts (192.168.*.255).

Turning off the Services is easy enough. However, I cannot figure out how to turn off the network traffic (short of disabling the drivers). What is worse, when I disable the Services mentioned above, some of the NetBIOS datagrams start getting unicast outside the local network, ie, they go out over the internet (or, at least, they would if my firewall didn't stop them). Can't quite figure out why that happens, but I don't like it.

What's also bothersome is that in some cases local processes are communicating via VMware's virtual ethernet adapters. Eg, here's the TCPView output for MSN Messenger:

msnmsgr.exe:3000 UDP 192.168.64.1:8335 :

msnmsgr.exe:3000 UDP 192.168.153.1:12776 :

msnmsgr.exe:3000 UDP 192.168.0.100:7938 :

The first two entries are VMware's virtual adapters and the third one is the actual address.

So, can anyone tell me how I can stop VMware's virtual ethernet adaptors from generating traffic when Player is not running?

TIA.

[faustie]

I should add that I am aware that I can disable/enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP for each virtual adapter using "wmic" in the same script I disable/enable services, but 1) there is more than just NetBIOS traffic, and 2) I'm looking for something a bit cleaner that will prevent any traffic from going out on those virtual adapters.

[jokke]

Open network connections and disable vmnet1 and vmnet8, that will effectively shut down all traffic on those interfaces. Then anable again before starting player.

It can also be scripted with vnetlib;

"vnetlib -- disable adapter vmnet1"

"vnetlib -- enable adapter vmnet1"

Joakim

[faustie]

Well, as I noted I had been hoping to find a way other than disabling the virtual network devices, but I guess that's really the only way.

Thank you very much for the method to script it using vnetlib, which surprisingly is provided with the Player. As I have discovered, there is no way to disable a NIC in XP via WMIC or NETSH (though it can be done in Vista). The only way Windows provides to control devices in XP via the command line (that I found, anyway) is to use a debugging utility called devcon <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272>, Your suggestion is much more elegant.

Btw, I just found your vnetlib doc at <http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9571>. That's some nice work, though it's quite discouraging that none of it is officially documented.

The whole reason I installed VMWare Player was to avoid going through the trouble of setting up a XP/Ubuntu double boot on my laptop, but given all the undoc-ed kruft VMware adds to my XP system, I'm rethinking my choice. I just hope the uninstall is cleaner than the install.

[jokke]

I would certainly recommend doing it the virtual way.

If you are worried about the networking, there is also usb nics as a great option. You can then have networking in the guest through usb and still have the virtual nics in the host disabled.

But a guest will not be able to handle any pci devices and pcmcia directly. Then you would have dualboot to have your "other" OS use pcmcia directly.

Btw, that document about vnetlib and commandline configurations are now up at in a much nicer and easy reading format.

Joakim

Message was edited by: jokke