A tip or two for VMware Fusion (OS X) guest networking

Before I get into this post too far, yes, I’m now a Mac user. Not exactly a fanboy yet, but my new employer let me choose between a Windows laptop and a MacBook for my work computer, so I chose–wisely. I’d been using Ubuntu on an HP laptop (ugh to HP) for a few years, so it seemed like a chance to try something new at no cost to me, which is my favorite cost.

As you can see from my other posts about virtualization, I’m a big fan of Virtualbox, but this post is about VMware Fusion, which was provided to me with my MacBook.

On to the tips…

I’ve been creating a testing environment for tacacs+ servers for a Cisco networking environment as well as Puppet server management, and I’m horrible with remembering IP addresses, unless there’s a very distinct pattern. When you use NAT in Fusion, addresses are assigned to guests VMs via DHCP in an automatically generated scope. The problem is, every time you boot your server you may get a new DHCP address! That sucks.

What to do?

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Virtualbox 4.0 = good stuff

Virtualbox is definitely my favorite virtualization tool. Yes, I know there are other, more popular ones, but Virtualbox is free, runs on many platforms, and isn’t clunky to use, like some unnamed others. We all have our preferences, and Virtualbox is definitely mine.

I haven’t had a lot of time to kick the tires yet, but one of the best features I’ve found in the latest, 4.0, version is an easy method to export virtual machines that you’ve built. There were ways to do it before, but now it’s easy.

Once you’ve installed/upgraded to version 4.0, simply choose Export Appliance from the File menu of the Virtualbox Manager. The first one I did took less than 10 minutes from start to finish, all wrapped-up in a single file.

Like I said: good stuff.

Ubuntu, Linksys WUSB600N v1, Dish DVR: whose @#$% idea was this?

I love Ubuntu and give myself a little “mental hug” each day for making the switch from Windows to Linux. But, sometimes, the stuff I want/need to do in Linux just isn’t as obvious to me as I’d like; so, I beat my head against a wall trying to figure it out, until my wife gives me that “walk away from it for awhile so you can maintain the little bit of sanity you have left” look. This particular situation is one of those.

What I wanted to do: I have a Dish Network DVR in my living room that has an ethernet card in it, but I don’t have any ethernet wiring where it is. What I do have is an Ubuntu XBMC HTPC with an on-board ethernet card and a Linksys WUSB600N v1 (the version number is important here, I think), connected to a Linksys WAP610N AP (configured for 5GHz 802.11N only), so it stands to reason that I should be able to share the HTPC’s internet connection with the Dish DVR, right?

Ok, so it wasn’t. Twice. Once for Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) and once for 10.04 (Lucid).

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