Changing the Physical Interface for a VMware Bridged Interface

Sep 13, 2007

I use VMware to run a virtual Windows machine for my company’s VPN and the occasional game of Starcraft. When I moved and switch from a wired network to wireless, the device with which I connect to the internet changed from good old eth0 to the new-fangled ath0. VMware was setup to tie its virtual interface for bridged networking to eth0. Since eth0 no longer has a network connection, the virtual machine lost the internet as well. To fix this, I had to open /etc/vmware/locations and change the reference to eth0 to ath0. The virtual interface that I use is vmnet0 so the line in the file referenced VNET_0_INTERFACE. Simply changing that line and restarting the VMware backend (/etc/init.d/vmware restart) fixed everything.