Thanks.
A comprehensive and informative reply.
I think part of my issue may be hampered by the fact I am using win2K.
By default, win2k doesn’t do any of the software routing stuff. I went in and REGEDIT’d it so that IPEnableRouting is turned on.
But there is another part, one of the system services a routing snapin of sorts, that I can’t find a clue out about how to actually USE it, I turned it on using Admin Tools, but can’t find any way how to tweak the settings once it’s started.
My idea has always been:
Machine A is 192.168.0.70 and runs VM 192.168.0.100
Machine B is 192.168.0.66 and can ping 192.168.0.70 quite ok.
Making NO CHANGES, I cannot ping 192.168.0.100 from machine B.
If I do this on B:
Route Add 192.168.0.100 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.70
then does that not mean if I do a PING from machine B to 192.168.0.100, he knows enough to send it to 192.168.0.70
What does 192.168.0.70 do with it? I am assuming he at least looks at it and says, hey, this is for somebody else, not me... does he trash it without routing turned on? I added 192.168.0.100 to the routing table on 192.168.0.70 but it still didn’t get there, and I can only assume it’s because machine A doesn’t have all the router snapin stuff set up to serve as a router. Leave it to Microsoft to put in like 12 options that seem to possibly conflict with each other or override...
Anyways, thanks, if you have any ideas about what I just described, lemme know. I searched the internet far and wide and still couldn’t find out how to use that dm snapin thingie!
The class C address 192.168.0 with subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 will yield 254 host ID's on that network ID; 0 and 256 are reserved for network & broadcast IP addressing. The host ID's run from 1 through 255; given that host ID 1 is reserved (by convention) for the gateway, 192.168.0.100 is a legit host ID on the network 192.168.0.0.
I don't know what, if anything, intrinsic Win2k IP routing capability has to do with anything here. You're trying to implement NAT with the ROUTE command (that's just not right). Fundamentally all IP addresses boil down to MAC addressing. It doesn't matter how the IP addresses are assigned to particular nodes, i.e., APIPA, DHCP or static. What matters is that the gateway is aware of the nodes that exist on the network its serving. In most cases VM hosts will support multiple vm’s; this is especially true when running VM's on a laptop (where each vm needs a unique IP address on any arbitrary LAN). Given that laptops are portable, it is very desirable that a vmware network setup should have several key features:
[source: VMware Server Virtual Network Architecture]
- Bridged networking — Although bridged virtual machines use the physical network connections on the host system, each virtual machine is treated as an independent client on the network. As such it will obtain an IP address from the network's DHCP server, or will require a static IP address to be manually configured if DHCP is not used. Virtual machines using bridged networking will be able to communicate directly with both the host system and other clients on the network to which the host is connected.
- Network address translation (NAT) — One or more virtual machines share the IP and MAC address of the host system for the purposes of communicating with the external network. Virtual machines are able to communicate with other clients on the network to which the host is connected, but will appear to those clients as the host system, rather than as individual network clients. This approach allows multiple virtual machines to operate using a single IP address. IP addresses are allocated dynamically to NAT based virtual machines by VMware Server's internal DHCP server. Communication with the external network can only be established by the virtual machine. It is not, therefore, possible for a client on the external network to initiate a connection with a NAT based virtual machine (although port forwarding may be configured to allow traffic to a particular port, such as HTTP traffic on port 80, to be directed to a specific virtual machine).
- Host-only networking - Creates a private sub-net within the host for virtual machines for which no external network access is required or desired. Virtual machines configured with host-only networking can communicate directly only with the host system and virtual machines which are also members of the same host-only network. The virtual machines cannot, however, communicate with the network to which the host is connected. IP addresses are allocated to Host-only based virtual machines by VMware Server's internal DHCP server.
When a VM comes on-line, it needs to either obtain an IP address from somewhere, i.e., either static, or dynamically via APIPA or DHCP. DHCP can be either a dedicated server to that end, or a functionality of the router. Former case and latter case there is no negotiation; the IP is either declared by the node (static) or assigned to it (DHCP). In the case of APIPA there is negotiation between the gateway and the node until a unique network ID is established. It doesn't matter how the VM gets its unique IP address, but the VM must utilize one of the three aforementioned networking methods.