VMware Fusion and FreeBSD: can't create static IP and can't keep dynamic IP

Question

I need a FreeBSD VM running on a new Mac machine. This is in order that I can test changes to the web server running on FreeBSD (company policy is that we test changes on an instance with a similar setup to our production environment.) However, currently I'm having very strange issues setting this up. (1) I was unable to setup a static IP without losing connection to the internet, by changing 'ifconfig_em0="dhcp"' to 'ifconfig_em0="inet [some-ip-address] gateway 255.255.255.0". I was no longer able to ping Google...

And more importantly (2) my IP address from DHCP seems to automatically change every couple of minutes. This will make it very difficult to work without being interrupted...

This pretty much explains the problem I'm having: http://www.thirdbit.net/articles/2008/03/04/dhcp-on-vmware-fusion/

However, this solution is not working for me -- I am unable to access the machine from the fixed ip address I setup for it. In particular I've noticed that the two locations described as containing the MAC address of the virtual network device have different addresses there... Against the ifconfig on the VM I see: 00:0c:29:68:79:ee and against the .vmx file there is: 00:0c:29:64:03:8b...

Does anybody have any ideas about how to troubleshoot this?

Answer 1

What you want in /etc/rc.conf is this:

ifconfig_em0="inet [some-ip] netmask [your-network-netmask]"
defaultrouter="[router-ip]"

If the network is running in "bridged" mode the [some-ip] should be a spare IP on your network, and the [router-ip] should be the IP address of your default router.

For example:

ifconfig_em0="inet 192.168.1.77 netmask 255.255.255.0"
defaultrouter="192.168.1.1"

You would also need to set up /etc/resolv.conf to have your DNS server address in, for example:

search my.domain.name
nameserver 192.168.1.1