Setup: -- MacOS X 10.5.1 on a MacBook Pro (Core Duo) -- Parallels 3 (Build 5582) -- Fedora Core 6 using Shared Networking. Parallels tools installed. I have been trying to get networking working via a variety of means, without success. I can't used Bridged networking because the campus network doesn't recognize the MAC address of my computer and won't issue a IP address. When I switch to shared networking (which works fine in my WinXP image), when Fedora Core 6 boots it gets to the part where it initializes the eth0 interface and it eventually fails on the step where it gets IP information. I have checked, yes, the Parallels NAT interfaces is running fine. Any ideas of how to get shared networking actually working with Fedora Core 6 (and unless you are providing me with an VM image of Fedora Core 7 or 8, don't tell me to upgrade. ).
How does your MBP get its IP address? DHCP? With my iMac (DHCP, using PPPoE) I cannot allocate a fixed IP to my VM (which is running CentOS a clone of RHEL so I presume quite close to Fedora). Set Fedora to use DHCP and Shared networking and you should be good to go. AFAIK the only way to allocate a fixed IP address to your VM is for your host machine to also have a fixed IP address that is private - I could be wrong here, I'm still digging for info.
My MBP gets its IP address via DHCP (at work, its direct ethernet to the switch, at home, from the wireless router). The problem is that I do have Fedora set up to retrieve its IP by DHCP (I think, I'll have to confirm that), but its attempts to get an IP address fail with shared networking. With bridged networking, it succeeded to get routing information from the DHCP server, but the switch refused to route the traffic for an unknown MAC address.
OK, if I understand correctly, when using Shared/NAT its Parallels that actually supplies the IP address - if you have DHCP for your guest OS. On my machine, it uses a private IP address range (10.X.X.X). Bridged means that essentially you have two machines. To quote from the Parallels Desktop for Mac User Guide : Bridged Ethernet Makes your virtual machine to appear on the local network as a separate computer. Works with Ethernet or Airport. I'd be interested to know what you have under your Network settings for Systems Preferences for each network interface. Note : I'm going away for Christmas so might not be able to reply to posts before the 3rd.
My network settings on the MacOS X side vary as I move from site to site, but generally it is DHCP over either Airport or Ethernet. You are correct in your understanding of Shared/NAT in Parallels. Basically, Parallels has a built-in DHCP server that it feeds IP addresses from on its own private IP range (as you surmised, 10.x.x.x). The issue I am having is that in a bridged setup, the Fedora Core 6 environment does talk to the campus DHCP server (which refuses to farm an IP address out to the unknown MAC address of the Fedora Core 6 environment). So Fedora is properly set up for DHCP retrieval of an IP address, but if I switch to a shared networking setup, in which Parallels is supposed to act as a router to its virtual environments, it apparently doesn't work with Fedora Core 6.
I just realized while the network entries (in the Network pref pane) were "green" for the parallels NAT and Bridging interfaces, they had self-assigned IP addresses. A reboot of my Mac fixed the problem (I tried reseting the parallels networking, but haven't quite figured out the command line mojo to get it to reset without a reboot).
/etc/init.d/network restart I use CentOS (clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) so it should be the same for Fedora.
