Linux guest can't see Windows host DNS: VMWare Linux RHEL5 Windows DNS

by: junior15Posted on 2009-03-19 at 16:38:02ID: 23935705

One question to clarify your settings? Is your VMware guest setup with Bridged Networking or NAT network? I'm pretty sure you can't have both. If it is bridged, then the guest will virtually be on the same LAN as everything else on your network. If it set to NAT, then the guest will route all it's traffic through a virtual LAN adapter on your Host. If you are using NAT but have assigned IPs on the same subnet, that might be causing some issues. I would recommend setting the guest to Bridged as that sounds like what you want to do.

by: jheringtonPosted on 2009-03-19 at 20:12:14ID: 23936607

Thanks for your assistance,
I'm a true beginner when it comes to vmware. Again, I am using VMware Workstation 6.5 running on a Windows 2003 Server. The inital WMware installation went fine except for an initial warning about installing on a Domain Controller and when I first rebooted there was some sort of IPSEC conflict but that did not reoccur after the first reboot. The host event logs are not showing anything interesting, specifically the DNS event log looks clean.

What I see in the VMware Virtual Network Editor is:
*Summary -
VMnet0(Bridged) Subnet: 255.255.255.0, DHCP: blank
VMnet1(Host-only) Subnet: 192.168.249.0, DHCP: Enabled
VMnet8(NAT) Subnet: 192.168.24.0, DHCP: Enabled
*Automatic Bridging - Automatically choose an available physical network adapter to bridge to VMnet0 is checked.
*Host Virtual Network Mapping - VMnet0: Bridged to automatically choosen adapter, VMNet1: VMWare *Network Adapter VMnet1, VMnet8: VMware Network Adapter VMnet8.
*Host Virtual Adapters - VMware Network Adapter WMnet1: enabled, VMware Network Adapter *WMnet8: enabled. DHCP - VMnet1: 192.168.249.0, VMnet8: 192.168.24.0.
*NAT - VMnet8: Gateway IP address: 192.168.24.2 netmask: 255.255.255.0, Service status: Started.

On the host DNS:
A record: 192.168.1.120
A record: 192.168.249.1
A record: 192.168.24.1
A record: 192.168.24.1 with Name: freedomsrv1
A record: 192.168.249.1 with Name: freedomsrv1
A record: 192.168.1.120 with Name : freedomsrv1 (this is the actual host IP address)
A record: 192.168.1.105 with Name : itsa3 (I added this one)
Note that DDNS and DHCP are not turned on for the host.

On the guest (RHEL5) I did configure Bind manually just to make sure I could surf the web, etc. I setup a Hosts file and all seems setup Okay but still can't fine the host nameserver.

The host network is 192.168.1.x, the host is 192.168.1.120, the guest is 192.168.1.105 both are static. The host is running DNS but not DHCP.

Both the host and the guest seem to be running as long as the guest does not depend on the host DNS. I can not get the guest to get a successful NSLookup for either the IP or hostname of the host. The host see's its own DNS just fine and both can ping eachother just fine.

Sorry if I provided too much info but I just want to make sure the full setup is presented. I really need to get this going asap.

Thanks!

by: junior15Posted on 2009-03-19 at 20:27:17ID: 23936650

OK. I haven't used VMware Workstation 6.5, but it shouldn't be that different from their other products. What you want to do is shutdown the VM (the guest) and then edit the properties of the virtual machine. You want to find the properties of the networking and change that to bridged, if it's not already set that way. It my give you a list of which NIC or network to use and you would select VMnet0 since that is your bridged interface.

I know VMware Workstation used to set the networking up as NAT (and VMware Fusion still does) by default. Hopefully this is the way yours is setup and making that change fixes your problem.

If that doesn't fix the problem (or it is already set to bridged), then I'm not sure what could be the problem. Something else to try is to try to use an external DNS server. You said that when you used BIND on the guest, you could surf the web with no problem, right? Try setting up your guest OS to use a DNS server on the Internet (or you can just run nslookup and change the server to one on the Internet). You can try OpenDNS's servers (The OpenDNS nameservers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220). That will at least tell you if your guest can use a DNS server other than itself. If it can't then it could be a firewall issue. Do you have the firewall enabled on your guest? If you do get a reply from the external DNS servers, then maybe it's the setup on your Windows DNS server. Do you have another computer on the network that you can use to test the Window DNS server to see if it will respond to requests from another computer?

I know I put a lot of stuff in here, but with your setup, there are quite a few things that could cause problems. As great as virtual environments are (and I do love VMware), they can be a royal pain to troubleshoot if something doesn't work right.

Hope this helps. If not, please provide as much information about what worked and didn't work and what you tried so hopefully we can help get you fixed.

by: jheringtonPosted on 2009-03-19 at 22:15:15ID: 23937002

Thank you for your support on this matter!
It would appear the Windows Server firewall was to blame. I believe I need to add udp 53, tcp 53,139 and 445 to the firewall exceptions list...I will try that. But more importantly, when I was looking at the available network settings in VMware, I believe by simply switching from default bridged to custom bridged and back again, I screwed up my network on the guest. I had to delete the eth0 network because ifconfig claimed it could not find it? I added a new one which was called eth0:1 and now every time I restart I have to manually restart/activate the network. Any thoughts on what the heck I did and how to get the guest back to normal operations with regard to the eth0 device.

Thanks!

by: junior15Posted on 2009-03-20 at 06:11:00ID: 23938934

I'm glad you got it fixed. I'm sorry to say that I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about linux as I am about VMware so I'm not going to be much help on that part. If you haven't done too much customization of the OS, it may be easier to just re-install the OS on the guest now that you have all the settings in VMware correct.

by: jheringtonPosted on 2009-03-20 at 07:58:20ID: 23939920

Thanks very much for your excellent support on this matter!

That is basically what I did. I was able to go back to a previous snapshot and then do some minor work to get things back up to current.

Thanks Again!

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Linux guest can't see Windows host DNS

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