Hi,

First post so please be gentle

My work network has various restrictions on how to get out of it, only ports 80 and 443 are allowed out and there is a proxy in the way that requires authentication.

I connect to my Linux box at home, from work, in the following way:

Using putty:

SSH to my public IP/hostname on port 443. Use putty to get through the authenticating proxy server. I believe it's possible to use something called connect.c on Linux, but I haven't worked out how to do this yet. Hence my use of Windows + putty.

At the other end I have a normal ADSL router which forwards port 443 on my Linux box to port 22 on the router. There is no firewall running on the Linux box

I then use putty to tunnel ports through the established connection to use various things on the network at home, e.g. RDP, FreeNX, VNC.

This worked fine until yesterday when I installed VMWare Workstation 5. It even worked fine after I installed it, I created a Windows VM on it (for now, there's still some Windows software I use). I was installing Windows on the VM over the link from work and all was fine, when suddenly, I lost all connectivity. This happened to coincide with the part of the XP install where it determines network settings.

At first I thought it was a hardware failure, but I got home to find everything working fine, hardware- and network-wise (I run amule and a bittorrent client on the box, amongst other things) and from inside my home network, everything worked fine, I was able to SSH in and everything just fine.

My question really is to do with VMWare running on a Linux host with a Windows guest, the ins and outs of VMWare's virtual networking, and whether anyone has had any experience of this (admittedly unusual) situation.

I haven't had a chance to look at any logs or anything, but I'm going to do some testing tonight to see what I can turn up...

Thanks

Jerry