Hi everybody,
I am a hardware engineer with good programming skills and intermediate networking knowledge in industrial environment (so it is Windows, Linux, PLC, embedded devices, virtual machines...) and came across an interesting issue which is driving me crazy since a few days.
I couldn't find info about it anywhere on the internet (this forum included), and also a lot of experimenting didn't bring any success.
I will describe my setup and the issues i have, maybe someone else has faced the same problem and can help (or maybe we can work together at it).
The host pc is a Win10 Pro machine and is quite restricted by domain policy.
One of the restrictions is that Internet Connection Sharing is disabled.
My company IT will not change it, they are really strict on that (also because it's not a work related issue).
My IoT device is Ethernet only and I can connect it to the Internet only through the laptop Ethernet (the hotel has only WiFi Internet in the rooms). WiFi for this device is not an option.
My VM is a VMware Player machine with 2 network adapters, since I already know that with multiple network connection it is necessary to avoid automatic bridging.
Therefore, I have removed my Ethernet and the WiFi adapters from VMnet0 and assigned them to VMNet3 and 2 respectively.
My VM has 2 network adapters, which I have connected to VMnet2 (direct bridging to host WiFi) and VMnet3 (direct bridging to host Eth port) respectively.
Guest operating system is Win10 Pro.
When I am able to connect the VM to Internet with direct bridging (VMNet2) I can enable ICS and everything works fine.
But when I am forced to use NAT, my device cannot connect to the Internet in any way.
I have tried to:
-disconnect, reconnect, enable, disable the connections in all possible sequences: no luck.
-use network bridging instead of ICS: no luck.
-restart VMware NAT and DHCP services: no luck.
-clear all routing / arp info: no luck.
-use of static or automatic IP addresses doesn't change anything.
AFAIK, the NAT/direct bridging of the host WiFi is 100% external to the VM, so why does it stop working when i (have to) use NAT?
IMHO this should work seamlessly also with NAT.
Conversely, when i try to use VMnet2 (direct bridging) I don't understand why the hotel router doesn't serve its connection request as it would do for a physical device.
I hope that a solution can be found. Thanks and regards,
Michael