I installed Red Hat 9 in a virtual machine running under VMware Player according to the article, "HOW TO: Run Other OSes On Your PC" (can't link to it yet--newbie). Works great except that I lose network connectivity when I restart RH9! Maybe VMware is overwriting my settings somehow? Maybe this is just an RH9 networking issue. Please help.

This how to reproduce my problem:

1. Restart RH9 to start with a clean slate.
2. ping 192.168.1.1; says, "connect: Network is unreachable."
3. From GUI Network Configuration tool, set and select static IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway to 192.168.1.105, 255.255.255.0, and 192.168.1.1, respectively. Click OK. Save configuration; click OK.
4. Click Activate ( same as "ifup eth0").
5. ping 192.168.1.1; get a bunch of "Destination Host Unreachable."
6. From Network Configuration tool, select DHCP; click OK. Save configuration; click OK.
7. ping 192.168.1.1; get a bunch of "Destination Host Unreachable."
8. Enter "ifup eth0" at command line. Says, "Determining IP information for eth0... done." Via ifconfig, I see that VMware DHCP assigned IP address of 192.168.71.128, mask 255.255.255.0 (I'm using VMware NAT mode).
9. ping 192.168.1.1; get responses!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10. Restart RH9. On the way back up RH9 says, "Bringing up interface eth0: Determining IP information for eth0... failed; no link present. Check cable? [FAILED]"
11. ping 192.168.1.1; says, "connect: Network is unreachable." I'm back to where I started.
12. Enter "ifup eth0" at command line. Says, "Determining IP information for eth0... failed; no link present. Check cable?" Via ifconfig, the IP address/network mask is now 127.0.0.1/255.0.0.0.

For step 6, if I also specify DNS addresses of 207.235.20.7 and 168.215.165.186 and DNS search path of zeecon.com (probably not needed), besides being able to successfully ping 192.168.1.1 in step 9, I am also able to ping google.com, browse the internet, e.g., msnbc.com, etc. Everything works! However, restarting RH9 negates all my gains. All of my previous settings show up in the Network Configuration tool, e.g., use-DHCP and the DNS addresses, but I have to go through steps 3 through 8 again to bring network connectivity back.

Never mind, I found the fix in another thread. I had come across this particular fix earlier, and it didn't help me then. I guess that several things needed to be in position, so to speak, for it to all come together. Needed to add this to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:
I'm guessing that, to RH9, the spooky, virtual VMware network device looks as if it is "down" when RH9 boots, so RH9 marks it as being down for the duration, even though it is configured correctly. This snippet of code apparently makes the link look as if it is up all the time, which is enough to fool RH9 when it boots. At least, that's my best guess. Sorry for the wasted bandwdith.