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I'm currently playing with VMware Fusion on Mac OS X 10.6 with an Ubuntu Server 9.10 as guest OS. VMware is configured for bridged networking (automatic detection). But there is no internet access and I cannot find the bridged adapter in my wifi.

Does anyone know how to set up a bridged network?

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  • When your you click Virtual Machine > Network Adapter do you see check marks next to: "Network Adapter: Connected" and "Bridged"? When you say you can't find the bridged adapter in your wifi do you mean on your mac? – Dave Holland Jan 6 '10 at 3:55
  • Yes it is "Connected" and "Bridged". I didn't find the network adapter in the OS and in the wifi itself. Must the adapter be installed in Mac OS X? – Bernd Jan 6 '10 at 11:48
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You'll need to use NAT on a WiFi adapter, you can't used a bridged interface unless your WiFi access point is configured for open access (i.e. not WEP, WPA, WPA2, etc.).

Remember that in WiFi the adapter goes through different phases to negotiate authentication, association, and encryption between the access point and the client. The MAC address of the client is an integral part of that process so simply adding a new MAC address to the client through bridging doesn't automatically start that process again with the additional MAC.

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    Bridged networking on wifi works in Parallels. – Tim Coker Feb 26 '13 at 18:52
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Luckily, Dave's answer isn't entirely correct. Fusion is perfectly capable of presenting two IP addresses behind the one authenticated Wifi Session session.

Only problem is that most routers will not issue two DHCP leases to the same WiFi MAC.

If you really need your guest OS to function as a server over WiFi (i.e. accept inbound connections) the simplest way is to assign it a static IP address within the local sub-net of your WiFi network, then select "Bridged" mode.

There are other ways which involve creating port-forward rules by manually editing config files, but because they've Macified the GUI in an effort to make things simpler, there is no way to do this via the user interface.

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  • In bridged mode the VM uses a different MAC address from the host, so why would a router not issue two different IP addresses? – RalfFriedl May 12 '19 at 13:13
  • This is kind of correct. Under the 802.11x standard, there is a single authenticated channel between the base-band unit in your (presumably) laptop and the router. The assumption of a 1:1 correspondence between MAC address and authentication session isn't totally unreasonable, especially for cheaper equipment. Unless you can expose your WiFi modem in such a way as to allow your guest OS to separately authenticate (something I've never seen) then it is entirely reasonable for your WiFi AP to assume that each connection will manage it's own encapsulated Ethernet packets. – Adam Lopes Oct 18 '19 at 7:29

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