WS 7.1 - Keep losing my NIC for Bridging

[JoshFink]

All of a sudden I'm getting a problem with WS 7.1. For some reason my integrated NIC is gone for automatic bridging.

Yesterday I reinstalled and I had both of my NICs in there, Wireless and Wired. I suspended my VM, shut down WS. When I brought it back up today my VM showed now network connectivity. When I went into Virtual Network Editor under "Bridge To" it only shows my Wireless NIC now. Wired doesn't even show up.

Any ideas?

Thanks for the help

Josh

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Assuming this is Windows, make sure you have the "VMware Bridge Protocol" selected (checked) under your wired network adapter properties.

Good Luck!

[JoshFink]

It is checked already.

Thanks

Also, if I click "Restore Defaults" in the network editor, it brings it back but then it goes away again after a reboot.

[continuum]

automatic-bridging does not work on hosts with more then one physical nics - so assign a vmnet manually to each of your physical nics




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VMX-parameters- WS FAQ -[ MOAcd|http://sanbarrow.com/moa241.html] - VMDK-Handbook

[JoshFink]

Has this changed recently? I've never had this problem before and I've been running it like this since 6.x

[continuum]

no - this has not been changed since years

after 6 years troubleshooting of WS network issues I generally do NOT troubleshoot any network issues with bridged as long as the user has not deactivated that stupid automatic-bridging




_________________________

VMX-parameters- WS FAQ -[ MOAcd|http://sanbarrow.com/moa241.html] - VMDK-Handbook

[JoshFink]

Ok.. So I understand this then.

How come the whole NIC disappears out of the drop down box then. Any idea? I can understand it not work but for it to just go away. Kind of a pain.

[continuum]

looks like a new feature of WS 7

you can keep a backup of this registry key :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\VMnetBridge

then you could restore it like

net stop vmnetbridge

regedit /s vmnetbridge-export.reg

net start vmnetbridge




_________________________

VMX-parameters- WS FAQ -[ MOAcd|http://sanbarrow.com/moa241.html] - VMDK-Handbook

[WMHCUser]

We were fighting a ongoing seemingly random issue just like this. VMWare Workstation would lose its network connectivity at various times. The host maintained connectivty and all looked well on the VM. The bridging looked OK as well. No log entries (that we could find either)

We found that we would have to 'diconnect' the bridge and turn around a reconnect it and all would be right in the world, till the next time.

We were right clicking on the icon in the lower right corner to facilitate this.

We could never reporduce the cause, that is, we couldn't make it happen (well at least, hadn't figured out how to make it happen)

Stumbled across this a gave it a try.

In the Network Config part of VMware was saw that the NIC had McAfee NDIS added to its heading.

Did a search and found something to NDIS causing issues.

I was desperate at this point so we followed the NDIS unistall steps and have not had a Bridge Drop or Disconnect since.

Happy that it is working so I haven't had a chance to really dive into what is/was going on but wanted to put this out there as I had NO luck finding a solution. Hope this might help.