Purpose:

I only have one IP address assigned to my server and I have multiple virtual machines hosted on the server. In order to make those virtual machines access the Internet, I set up the VMWare network to be NAT. However, once a while the vmware NAT process runs 100% CPU and crashed the whole syste that I have to restart the machine. Replacing NAT with host-only virtual network is a work-around solution I found.

Procedure:

1. Virtual server configuration:
   1. Run /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl, select host-only network instead of NAT

      *note: if the Network Connections can not find any network interface (e.g. eth0), edit /etc/network/interfaces and comment out all except the following:

      auto lo

      iface lo inet loopback

   2. On vmware web interface, change network adapter to host-only.
   3. Turn on virtual server and config its ethernet adapter as following:
      

      Static IP: 172.16.96.100
      Primary DNS: 64.15.139.162
      Secondary DNS: 208.67.222.222
      Gateway: 172.16.96.1

      *note: the subnetwork are different each time you run vmware-config.pl. Make it to whatever static IP address for iptable NAT rules

2. Iptables rules
   

   Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)

   target prot opt source destination

   ACCEPT tcp — anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:www

   ACCEPT tcp — anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:ssh

   ACCEPT tcp — anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:2222

   ACCEPT tcp — anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:https

   ACCEPT tcp — anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:8222

   ACCEPT tcp — anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:8333

   ACCEPT tcp — anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:902

   ACCEPT tcp — anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:smtp

   DROP all — anywhere anywhere

   Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)

   target prot opt source destination

   Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)

   target prot opt source destination

3. Modify /etc/fstab to the new base virtual adapter IP address.
4. Modify /etc/samba/smb.conf to recoganize the new virtual adapter vmnet1
5. To fix SSH login slow problem edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and add a line “UseDNS no”