Host-only networking + basic network access

[mattross]

I'm trying to setup a VM with XP Pro running Visual Studio, IIS and SQL Server so that our users have full administrative control on a development machine. The host \[also XP Pro] is locked down in a student lab environment with heavy restrictions.

I don't want them to manipulate the network but I do want port 80 from the guest to be viewable on the host. Is this at all possible without bridging or NAT? If not can it be locked down sufficiently in bridging mode to prevent them doing anything else on the network in addition to what I dictate?

I am using VMware Player on the lab PCs but I'm building the image in the full VMware Workstation 6.

Thanks.

[oreeh]

As the name host-only indicates, it only "allows" network traffic between the host and the guest (regardless of the direction).

[mattross]

I understand that, but from the host if I open 'http://192.168.235.128' in a web browser it fails to load the web server running in the guest as I was hoping it might.

So is there a way of controlling what traffic makes it from guest to host in host-only mode?

[oreeh]

So is there a way of controlling what traffic makes it from guest to host in host-only mode?

only the host and guest firewalls

Make sure your host and guest use the same IP scheme in this particular vmnet.

[mattross]

Both have the built-in firewall off, and no others installed.

Please can you explain what you mean about the 'IP scheme'? The host is using 192.168.235.1 for the host-only NIC, and the VMware DHCP server assigned 192.168.235.128 to the guest. Apart from select 'host-only' I haven't touched the network configuration of VMware.

[oreeh · Accepted solution]

Looks good.

Do the following: open a command shell, cd to the WS directory and start

"vnetsniffer vmnet1"

After that open an connection from the host to the VM web server and

post the output of vnetsniffer (if there is any)

[mattross]

Sorry I just worked out what was wrong. My web browser uses a remote proxy server on our LAN and it was trying to send 192.168.* requests to it. Now that I've bypassed it for those addresses vnetsniffer detects traffic and the web connection works.

Thanks for your time.