michaeldehaan.net

I’ve arrived at a fairly nice home virtual machine developer setup, that no longer cares whether I am docked or undocked. VirtualBox can set up a bridge around wlan0 by using the GUI — no manual setup, and it can also bridge wlan0. AFAIK, Virt Manager can still do neither of these things, though perhaps if you edit the libvirt XML and dnsmasq configurations you could get close. Further, the newly created bridges do not cause problems with NetworkManager or Firefox (as I’ve had happen in Fedora numerous times).

What I have:

• Virtual machines are set up to be bridged on wlan0
• Virtual machines are configured statically, i.e. 192.168.1.150+N (outside the DHCP range of the router), gateway=router_ip, dns=host_ip
• Host runs dnsmasq with each machine in /etc/hosts

(For purposes of full disclosure, this is on Ubuntu 9.10)

I would like to be using virt-manager and supporting my former Fedora cohorts instead, but this setup is way too portable and awesome. I’m also running on a Dual 3GHz system with 8GB of RAM, and … for some reason, VirtualBox seems faster (even with /dev/kvm present) and the graphics are also much better.

Anyway, I’m pleasantly surprised by this being as manageable as it is for a bridged setup.
I’d like it to be even easier, but I realize virtual machines outside of NAT are largely a server use case, so much more than that would probably be overkill — and server folk can handle it. I still can’t help but wonder what would happen if Virt-Manager was as usable as Virtual Box, and Virtual Box had Virt-Manager’s dnsmasq (with dynamic DNS so hostnames just worked everywhere) and also added a UI to configure it.

An aside: /sbin/dhclient-script clobbering /etc/resolv.conf? Not cool. Not cool.

(Really I’d like universally unique IPs all of the time, regardless of what networks I’m on. And a magic IP that is always the IP of the host the guest is running on. And SkyNet…)