Host-Only Network - how to enable it?

S

STim

Bit poster
Beta4 has an intersting improvement - a host-only networking.

Essentially, it is just a means to make your VMs and MacOS to communicate each other without the need of any bridged networking. Say, you're out of the office travelling from USA to Europe and need to have a network connectivity between MacOS and the VMs.

This beta has a small known issue - sometimes you have to enable it manually. To do it,
1. Open "System Preferences" on your MacOS
2. Click "Network" icon of "Internet & Network" group.
3. Select "Ethernet Adaptor (vi2)" in "Show" drop-down list
4. Click "TCP/IP" tab and select "Using DHCP" in "Configure IPv4"
drop-down list
5. Click "Apply Now" button
6. Restart your computer

Once enabled, it should work without any need to reconfigure.
 
A big hole in this design is that host-only IP addresses cannot access external networks or the internet.

Are there plans to allow guest-only systems to nat to the physical IP of en1 or en0 so they can establish outbound IP connections?

Maybe, share en0 and en1 connections to vi2?

John P.

Oh, and let us add more than one ethernet connection to a guest OS. Love to have one that is bridged to en1, one that is briged to en0 and a third that is host-only. All at the same time! :)
 
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That's not a hole; that's the intent. I for one am glad to have this option because I do not intend to allow all of my VM's to access the Internet, but I would like to be able to share files between OS's.

Still, I wonder if turning on connection sharing in MacOS X will give you the results you seek?
 
Yep, it's a hole. One that would make me choose another option (if there is ever one) instead of Parellels. There are many cases where you would want it. For example, if your at a hotel, you pay one daily rate (one mac address) for the host OS and all the guests to get to the internet. The way it is now, bridged, you would have to pay for each guest seperate.

For that matter, any internet connection where you're connected directly to the DSL modem, etc... you would want this.

Guest OS's are more secure in a nat'd hostonly setup rather than a bridged setup.

As it stands now, I have to shutdown the guest and bring it back up just to see the internet or other subnets in my network. A considerable pain and increased risk to guest systems since they now reside directly on a network somewhere.

You cannot use the sharing feature to turn this on, since you cannot share en0/en1 to vi2. Option is not there.

John P.
 
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Tim,

I'd love to be able to add a 2nd network adapter to my VM and enable Host-Only networking on that adapter. I could then enable/disable or even ignore the state of the bridged adapter when I don't need internet access.

This would allow me to always have connectiivty between the host and guest without having to worry about the bridged adapter.
 
CraigF said:
Tim,

I'd love to be able to add a 2nd network adapter to my VM and enable Host-Only networking on that adapter. I could then enable/disable or even ignore the state of the bridged adapter when I don't need internet access.

This would allow me to always have connectiivty between the host and guest without having to worry about the bridged adapter.
Click to expand...

Ditto on that feature request. This is how I set up my VMs with VMware (2 virtual adapters, one host only)
 
I agree!

Many of us have internet accounts where only one MAC address is allowed. If we chould share a connection via host-only networking, that would be THE ANSWER . Right now, Parallels is a bit of a pain to deal regarding the networking issue, due to this problem. For example, using a T-mobile "hotspot" in Starbucks, I can't seem to get an internet conection using a Parallels virtual machine, but I can at home using DSL.

I love Parallels, but this bug/feature is a real SHOW STOPPER as far as I am concerned. However, the overall product is so close to being perfect. I hope the engineers can fix this issue.

Thanks for the (almost) great product.

John
 
penrod---I do see your point---I guess I just disagreed with the idea of it being a "hole", just a sign of an incomplete implementation of network support (which we know of anyway). I guess that's just a silly semantic nitpick though. I do like the idea of a NAT-like solution.
 
After following the directions and rebooting Parallels told me I needed to log in as root and run Parallels.config and did not start. Then when I tried again it started.

Also, I agree with the comments on 2 NICs and NATting. That is how I have always run vmware. It is often much more convenient on my linux notebook to have a consistent network between host and guest, regardless of what my outside IPs may be
 
jassyjohn said:
Many of us have internet accounts where only one MAC address is allowed. If we chould share a connection via host-only networking, that would be THE ANSWER . Right now, Parallels is a bit of a pain to deal regarding the networking issue, due to this problem. For example, using a T-mobile "hotspot" in Starbucks, I can't seem to get an internet conection using a Parallels virtual machine, but I can at home using DSL.

I love Parallels, but this bug/feature is a real SHOW STOPPER as far as I am concerned. However, the overall product is so close to being perfect. I hope the engineers can fix this issue.
Click to expand...

Turns out I think I have a workaround for this. I got on a cable modem at a friend's house, and the VM resisted all attempts to use DHCP, hardcoded IP addresses, etc. I then tried to turn on Mac Internet Connection Sharing, in the Sharing Control Panel under System Preferences. I then turned on Host-only Networking in the VM, and that didn't work either, and I couldn't even use Drive Mapping to mount my shared folder (as I had been able to before).

Long story short, I went back to the VM, turned on Bridged Ethernet with the built-in E0 port, and then went back to Windows XP and set up the networking to use DHCP to get an address. I did hard-code a DNS server address that I generally use, that might or might not be necessary. In any case, XP immediately got an IP address from the Mac (presumably because Sharing was turned on) and reported a default gateway as well. Note that these IP addresses were local (192.168.0.2 for XP, and 192.168.0.1 for the Mac as a gateway). I could then use the Internet with no problems, and switch over to the Mac and access the Internet there as well. Looks like in that mode that the Mac is doing NAT to share the Cable Modem connection.

Hope this helps,

Taylor
 
Thanks Taylor, that worked great! Using your technique my parallels application now happily accesses the internet through OS X's internet sharing.
 
not working out of the box

hi all,

I followed the instructions ion the first message, but that did not fix it for me. I had to de-install the parallels windows tools that I installed in Beta3 and reinstall them in Beta4. Then it worked for me. The problem might have been that the paralells network card was not found in windows after going to Beta4.

but now, I am a happy user of parallels :-)
 
Multiple adapters

Having the ability to create/access multiple adapters from the client OS would solve many problems for me.

I envision the following configuration for Windows:
Network Adapter 1: Bridged to en0 -- direct access to my wired network when connected
Network Adapter 2: Bridged to en1 -- direct access to my wireless network when connected
Network Adapter 3: Host only -- always available access to my Mac resources


The ability to use connection sharing as an option when in Host only mode would be a plus for those cases where bridging is not practical or where the additional protection of the guest OS from the real world is desired.
 
Broadcast dows not seem to work in Beta 4

I am a developer and I can't seem to send BCast using Host-Only Network to MacOS. The Code works on Windows/Linux/and Mac. But not between VM.

Robert
 
"host only" network can go outside also

Hi, guys, I think I have find out the way about how to access internet with "host only" setting. The trick is one just enable "internet sharing" in the "system preferences" and set the correct outgoing internet port, and select one of your favorate internet port to go through the outging port. Assume you have set your paralles vm to use host only network and you already see the vi2 interface in the host machine, use ifconfig to find out what ip address your host machine have got for vi2 (I think should be the same as what I got: 10.37.129.2). Then you boot up your VM XP, normally now the xp is using DHCP and it can not access the internet yet. Just change the TCP/IP property in the VM XP from DHCP to manully input, and set the ip address as: 10.37.129.10 for eg, set netmask as 255.255.255.0, and (!!!) set gateway as the host vi2 ip address: 10.37.129.2. Seems you also need to set the DNS server address as what the host is using. Then you will be able to get internet connection inside VM. The reason this method works is that enabling "internet sharing" on the osx host will make your machine act as a gateway and do ip forwarding. The only extra work need is then tell the VM machine to use your host gateway.
 
c789a123 said:
Hi, guys, I think I have find out the way about how to access internet with "host only" setting. The trick is one just enable "internet sharing" in the "system preferences" and set the correct outgoing internet port, and select one of your favorate internet port to go through the outging port. Assume you have set your paralles vm to use host only network and you already see the vi2 interface in the host machine, use ifconfig to find out what ip address your host machine have got for vi2 (I think should be the same as what I got: 10.37.129.2). Then you boot up your VM XP, normally now the xp is using DHCP and it can not access the internet yet. Just change the TCP/IP property in the VM XP from DHCP to manully input, and set the ip address as: 10.37.129.10 for eg, set netmask as 255.255.255.0, and (!!!) set gateway as the host vi2 ip address: 10.37.129.2. Seems you also need to set the DNS server address as what the host is using. Then you will be able to get internet connection inside VM. The reason this method works is that enabling "internet sharing" on the osx host will make your machine act as a gateway and do ip forwarding. The only extra work need is then tell the VM machine to use your host gateway.
Click to expand...

This doesn't make any sense to me. Would you mind trying again? When I look at the Internet Sharing Preference Pane I don't have enough options to get the Ethernet (vi2) interface to use my Airport connection. If I select AIRPORT in the SHARE YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION FROM box, the only choice I have in TO COMPUTERS USING in BUILT-IN ETHERNET. I can select ethernet (vi2) interface in the SHARE YOUR INTERNET CONNETION FROM BOX, but that is the reverse of what we want to do. If I set that, then I would be trying to share the non-existent Ethernet (vi2) interface with the other ports on my Mac.
 
Hi, pkscout, you do not need to make vi2 interface to use Airport connection in the Internet Sharing Preference Pane because it is impossible in the moment. In your case, you need to select AIRPORT in the SHARE YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION FROM box, and TO COMPUTERS USING in BUILT-IN ETHERNET (this is the hard to understand part, just follow it for the moment), then start the internet sharing. Maybe you also stop the firewall for the moment, because I have not tested if it works with firewall on or not. Important step is then you need to setup tcp/ip MANUALLY in the virtue machine (xp for eg), and make sure the IP Address Gateway, Netmask, DNS server is set as described in my prevesious post.
 
Wim Smets said:
interesting, but won't you disturb the network behind BUILT-IN ETHERNET? (due to DHCP server?)
Click to expand...
That is assuming the build ethernet is not being used. If your real network connection to the outside world is through ethernet, you then select the network being shared as the build in ethernet port, and choose some other network port unused to share the internet, can be the firewire one I think. In the worst case if you really have your computer using all physical connection ports already, one can dig in the command line to make it work as a router and start natd.
 
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