RedHat in Win2K vmware VM lost external network access for no known reason
 

I've got an odd problem here that's got me stumped. For about three years I've been running a RedHat 9 installation on a VMWare virtual machine (VM) in a Windows 2000 host. The VM hosts a small web server, and it has worked like a champ for its whole life.

For no apparent reason, my VM has lost it's ability to connect with the outside. I can still see it from the physical machine, ssh into it, and access the web server, and the physical machine still has full access to the outside world. The VM, though can only see its host and nothing else. It has a separate IP, and other machines on the same LAN segment can see the host IP but not the VM IP.

The VM uses bridged networking, so the two machines share a physical ethernet port. Not only is that working, as shown by the host's normal operation, but I ran the virtual machine on another host with the same results. It must be either the linux OS or something in VMWare causing the problem. No configuration changes or updates were made when this happened -- it just stopped working one day. The ifconfig shows a normal connection by the VM to eth0 and a good IP; however, nothing makes it past the host.

Any help would be appreciated.

Robin Felix

Specs

Host - Windows 2000 Server (normal)/Windows XP (current test machine)
VM - RedHat 9
VMWare Workstation 5.5

Dumps

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 01)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 01)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 08)
00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB
00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 08)
00:0f.0 VGA compatible controller: VMWare Inc: Unknown device 0405
00:10.0 SCSI storage controller: BusLogic BT-946C (BA80C30) [MultiMaster 10] (rev 01)
00:11.0 Ethernet controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] 79c970 [PCnet32 LANCE] (rev 10)

Module Size Used by Not tainted
soundcore 7044 0 (autoclean)
parport_pc 19204 1 (autoclean)
lp 9188 0 (autoclean)
parport 39072 1 (autoclean) [parport_pc lp]
autofs 13684 0 (autoclean) (unused)
ipt_REJECT 3992 0 (autoclean)
pcnet32 18304 1 (autoclean)
mii 4124 0 (autoclean) [pcnet32]
iptable_filter 2412 0 (autoclean)
ip_tables 15864 2 [ipt_REJECT iptable_filter]
ide-cd 35808 0 (autoclean)
cdrom 34176 0 (autoclean) [ide-cd]
keybdev 2976 0 (unused)
mousedev 5688 0 (unused)
hid 22404 0 (unused)
input 6208 0 [keybdev mousedev hid]
usb-uhci 27468 0 (unused)
usbcore 82816 1 [hid usb-uhci]
ext3 73408 3
jbd 56432 3 [ext3]
BusLogic 100988 4
sd_mod 13452 8
scsi_mod 110872 2 [BusLogic sd_mod]

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:29:24:39:2D
inet addr:128.49.153.174 Bcast:128.49.155.255 Mask:255.255.252.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:6653 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:630 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:808815 (789.8 Kb) TX bytes:92846 (90.6 Kb)
Interrupt:18 Base address:0x1080

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:27189 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:27189 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:1910040 (1.8 Mb) TX bytes:1910040 (1.8 Mb)