Addressing the host Mac via static IP

[andrewvit]

Hi all,

I'm new here from Parallels, and I'm trying to find a way to do something that was possible in Parallels, but I can't figure out in VMWare.

Using what they call "shared networking," Parallels would give me an additional network interface in my Mac's control panel called "Parallels NAT", which had a static IP address (10.211.55.5) that I could access from the guest OS to connect to my Mac.

What this means is that my Mac could connect to any network using DHCP, and my virtual guest OS could still connect to the host Mac using an internal static IP. How can I do this in VMWare Fusion?

Thanks.

[WoodyZ]

VMware Fusion menu > Help > VMware Fusion Help > Managing Virtual Machines > Configuring the Network Connection

[admin]

Hi, welcome to Fusion!

The only difference is that Fusion doesn't put an entry in System Preferences. You can still use NAT mode, and you can still give the guest a static IP (by default, addresses ending in the range 3-127 should be fine, our DHCP server starts at 128).

[andrewvit]

Thanks, but that's not quite what I'm looking for. I'm probably not explaining myself right.

I don't really need a static IP for the guest, but I need the guest to have access to a static IP for the host, even if the host gets its IP dynamically from DHCP.

I need another internal static IP, kind of like "127.0.0.1" which never changes, but pointing to the host OS. Parallels does this automatically by adding a network interface on the host OS.

[asatoran · Accepted solution]

> I need another internal static IP, kind of like "127.0.0.1" which never changes, but pointing to the host OS. Parallels does this automatically by adding a network interface on the host OS.

That is exactly what NAT does. It puts your virtual machine on separate network, vmnet8. Go to Terminal and type ifconfig. You will see the IP address for your host in vmnet8.

[andrewvit]

Thanks, that's great. Exactly what I'm looking for.

[andrewvit]

Not quite there yet... I'm not sure if this problem is something to do with VMware or Windows at this point, but here goes:

I got the IP address of my host computer from ifconfig (192.168.36.1), and I added it to my Hosts file in Windows with the right hostname. (The host Mac runs apache with virtualhosts, so I need to access it by hostname, and I'm using the virtual windows for testing.)

I confirmed that the name resolution works, with a ping development.local in the Windows command prompt.

I can see the website if I go to http://development.local in Firefox.

But, if I try to access the website using IE7 or IE6, I get the following error:

Bad Gateway
The following error occurred:
The host name was not found during the DNS lookup. Contact your system administrator if the problem is not found by retrying the URL.
-

---

Please contact the administrator.

I have no idea what's going on, but it doesn't look like the apache server on the Mac is even getting hit, there's nothing in my access or error logs. Google has no answer today... Any ideas?