Nasty bug with Parallels networking - workaround

A

aberrant

Junior Member
Bear with me; this is not going to be as clear as I would like but I don't have the time to analyze the sniffer captures right now.

Turns out that Parallels networking in bridged mode has a very bad flaw in wireless connections when the DHCP server is not the wireless access point. What's happening is that the DHCP request is originating from the guest OS but the MAC address of the request is being rewritten to something other than the MAC address of the guest OS virtual interface. This causes the DHCP response to fail to reach the guest OS and the guest OS fails to complete the DHCP lease transaction as a result. A google search on "DHCP bridged networking parallels" will find other evidence of this problem.

This appears to only affect setups where the wireless access point is not the DHCP server.

The workaround is to ensure that DHCP services are running on the wireless access point.

I am unsure at this time whether WPA encryption is a contributing factor.

This happens on all versions I've tested from 1970 to 3120.

Anyone else have a better workaround? I'd like to run the DHCP server on another router I have (not my access point).
 
I wasn't aware of this bug. I have one machine with a windows vm in parallels set to use dhcp for network connections. Parallels is set to use bridged networking and it all works fine.
 
titetanium said:
I wasn't aware of this bug. I have one machine with a windows vm in parallels set to use dhcp for network connections. Parallels is set to use bridged networking and it all works fine.
Click to expand...

Please describe your setup: are you using wireless? WPA? DHCP server on the access point? If the answer to the first two questions is "no", or the answer to the last question is "yes", then it's a bad comparison. The problem appears to manifest itself when ALL of the following conditions are true:

1) wireless
2) WPA (though I'm not 100% sure this is a requirement)
3) DHCP server not on the access point
 
I've had the identical problem in every build since the 1st beta (1st ever beta before 1940 release). At work we have wireless AP with W2K DHCP server. Same problem. I've tried with and without WEP and WPA. No change in behavior. I've given up hope of having this solved.
 
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