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For some reason my Debian 4.0 box running under VBOX does not connect to the internet via NAT all the time, reason? I don't know. Anyway, I was able to get it up and running using the usual old, in the terminal configuration. First, since my first interface, eth0, is configured by default to get IP from DHCP, I have to bring it down, i.e. #: ifdown eth0 Now, let us bring it up manually with an IP that is probably not being used by other VMs running inside VBOX in this case we will try 10.0.2.3. #: ifconfig eth0 up 10.0.2.3 netmask 255.255.255.0 Note that by default, VBOX gateway is 10.0.2.2 or basically we can also say that this is the IP address of the host machine internally. Let us now add entry into the routing table to route traffic to the gateway. #: route add default gw 10.0.2.2 One last change we need to make is in the file /etc/resolv.conf. #: nano -w /etc/resolv.conf #<-- this line is not included, search for namesever nameserver 192.xxx.xxx.xxx Note that the IP addre

Name resolution in Linux is controlled by System Databases and Name Switch Configuration file which is located in /etc/nsswitch.conf, at least for my Debian based system. Note this is only true I think with libc5 and newer with NYS support and the GNU C Library 2.x (libc.so.6). The most import section to get a Linux to ping a Windows machine is the hosts statement. # ~: nano /etc/nsswitch.conf # <----- several lines before this one hosts: files dns wins What this says is that the gethostbyname and similar functions will first check the local database (/etc/hosts). If the name cannot be found then do use dns and finally wins. But for wins lookup to work, winbind needs to be installed. Winbind provides 3 major functions for integrating with Windows network. But we are not really using anyone of those 3 major functions but rather we need the functionality provided by /lib/libnss_wins.so library. So to get this file installed, do: #: apt-get install winbind And as a side note, I have

Since Debian Sarge is not officially supported by VMWare, getting Debian to work efficiently on VMWare needs some minor adjustments. Like the video driver, NIC and mouse driver needs to be updated. To take the full functionality of VMWare and to get better performance, user needs to install the vmware-tools. Below is a quick guide on how to install the vmware-tools in Debian Sarge. Note: need to log-in as root. 1) Get the version of Linux kernel. #: uname -r A sample output of the above command could be: >> 2.8.18-4-686 which basically says that you have a linux-2.8.18-4-686. 2) Now let us check if we have Linux headers for the version as shown above. #: apt-get install -s linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686 The statement above means that we will do a simulated install of package "linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686". See below for a sample output: technomachine:/home/techno# apt-get install -s linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... D