February 23, 2005
Virtual PC guide to Visual Studio Team System
Dave Bost just pointed out his new article on MSDN with a step-by-step guide to setting up the December CTP of VSTS on virtual PCs. I've had three spare boxes, so I've been able to get running but I know a number of people who have to deal with running a VPC configuration. This should help alot.
Posted by attili at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)
More on networking a virtual server to its host
Well, not luck with bridging the virtual network.
Since my host is WinXP, the full routing services from Win2K and Win2K3 are not available. The only routing supported is Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) that is crippled to only support 192.168.0.XXX subnets.
So, after changing the local subnet to 192.168.1.XXX, I am able to turn on ICS and now the virtual server can ping both the host and the rest of the network. Name resolution on the host works properly for accessing both the local intranet and the servers on the virtual network. DNS also works fine from the virtual network.
I'm not happy that the virtual network has to use NAT. I'll have to look further into why the virtual network can't attach to one endpoint of a Network Bridge on the host.
Posted by attili at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2005
Networking a virtual server to its host
I've been working today on setting up a Virtual Server configuration for my presentation on Continuous Integration at the next Code Camp.
With VPC, it was straightforward to get connectivity between the virtual PC and the host. But, I couldn't understand why I wasn't even able to ping between the virtual node and the host. It turns out that it's not nearly as easy as you'd think. This is what I had to do:
- Create a loopback adapter as described in this KB article.
- Create a new virtual network attached to the loopback adapter.
- That gets connectivity between the virtual server and the host, but now you can't connect to the rest of your network.
John Howard suggests setting up Internet Connection Sharing, but the default ICS wants to set up a private network on 192.168.0.XXX, and that sub net is already in use for my normal internal network.
- Rather that try to figure out how to change that, I chose instead to configure a network bridge.
- However, when I selected the loopback adapter and the wireless adapter and created a bridge, I lost connectivity from the laptop. I couldn't even pull an IP from the DHCP server.
- It turns out that many notebook wireless adapters don't go into promiscuous mode normally. This Win XP Network Bridge article held the answer.
- Force the adapter into compatibility mode using "netsh bridge set a # e"
Now, both my notebook host and the virtual server see both the internal network and each other.
UPDATE: I was wrong. It looks like the network bridge won't work in this case. The virtual network refuses to show any of the bridged adapters in the 'Network adapter on physical computer' combo box.
I'll have to move the internal network to 192.168.1.XXX so that I can use ICS.
Posted by attili at 07:20 PM | Comments (0)
February 09, 2005
New Site
Now that the new site is active, I've moved Amaxo's weblog here. I'll continue to provide updates on instrument design and software best practices.
Posted by attili at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)