Smoothwall Firewall project

Tuesday 15 March 2011

Changing the network settings with VMware player 3.1 on Linux


I came across an issue today, where I wanted to remove one of the virtual network interfaces that gets installed when you install VMware player. This turned out to be relatively straight forward, once you know where to look.

In VMware workstation , you get a great graphical tool to amend and alter the virtual network configuration, but not so with the free VMplayer.

The reason I wanted to do this was remove the virtual interface vmnet8, as I'm not using any NAT's interfaces, so this is not needed and will only consume resources.

Firstly point your favourite editor at /etc/vmware/networking as a root user and then modify the file like so.


7 answer VNET_8_DHCP no
8 answer VNET_8_DHCP_CFG_HASH B9130F0FB783D3AC081BDA79708F4635E63130A4
9 answer VNET_8_HOSTONLY_NETMASK 255.255.255.0
10 answer VNET_8_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 172.16.73.0
11 answer VNET_8_NAT no
12 answer VNET_8_VIRTUAL_ADAPTER no


The key , is that you have turned all the VNET_8 answers to no instead of yes.

Once this is safely saved, run the following commands to re-start the networking.

sudo vmware-networks --stop ; sudo vmware-networks --start

Once you have done this, if you now issue an /sbin/ifconfig you will notice that vmnet8 does now not appear.