I'm taking some night school courses, and I'm trying to work on some practice at home. However, I'm having a couple difficulties that don't show up in the school labs and wouldn't show up if I were doing this with real machines.

I'm trying to set up a separate network with virtual machines with a Windows domain, and practicing integrating a Linux system onto it. I don't have all the proper equipment for a true VLAN setup, but my switch has worked with a pure Windows or pure Linux setup when the virtual machines are put on a separate subnet.

I am using an aging Linksys Eatherfast 10/100 Cable/DSL router with 4-port switch that has served me well for the better part of the last decade. My problem is with DHCP, the Linux box is supposed to connect via DHCP, but it's finding my Linksys device's DHCP server and joining the wrong subnet.

Is there any solution other than temporarily turning DHCP on the Linksys box off and assigning static private IP addresses to my real computers in order to force Fedora 12 to access the Virtual machine?

Which virtualisation software are you using? If it's VirtualBox the default NAT virtual NICs would result in Linux in a VM using DHCP getting a lease from the host ...

I have virtual machines for both Virtual PC AND VMware. The school is switching from VirtualPC to VMware.

I actually mixed them up because I had a DC already set up on one, and a Linux configuration that only needed minimal changes for the other, but I"m at a point where I can easily switch to use one or the other.

I should mention that I don't have any Linux machines setup on Virtual PC, and I don't have any DCs set up on VMware. I do have a "virgin" install of server on VMware, but every time I've needed server I've either used the Virtual PC copy or at school I've booted a bookable drive that has a triple boot of XP, Server 2003, & Fedora.