VMWare Fusion Networking – How to Autoconnect New VM to Internet

networkingvmware-fusion

I'm using VMWare Fusion 7.1 on Mac OS X. All the VM's that I've downloaded connect to the internet automatically when I fire them up. I downloaded a new VM from VulnHub, specifically BrainPan2. (Here is the info about it if needed: https://www.vulnhub.com/entry/brainpan_2,56/)

This one does not connect to the internet automatically even though it is supposed to. It is a vulnerable VM setup for security penetration testing. Now, I fire up my Kali VM, do a network scan, and see all my computers. I'll fire up an unrelated virtual machine, run the scan again, and confirm that the new one appears. Now, I fire up BrainPan, run the scan, and nothing. I don't see it on the scan.

I've read multiple guides related to the BrainPan2 VM from the internet, and everyone else seems to be able to plug it in and go. From the BrainPan site:

It will get an IP address via DHCP,

So, I've set the VM to run on NAT, Bridged and also Host. I cannot detect the VM by any means, it just doesn't auto-connect. And I obviously can't login and hook it up since it's made to hack. Upon my research, I've found another similar question on this site but the gentleman provided no info in his question:
Can't get nmap info from Brainpan2

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Edit: It states in this article: http://blog.techorganic.com/2013/11/19/brainpan-2-hacking-challenge/

Brainpan 2 has been tested and found to work on the following
hypervisors:

VMware Player 6.0.1 ,
VMWare Fusion 6.0.2 ,
VirtualBox 4.3.2 Import

brainpan2.ova into your preferred hypervisor and configure the network
settings to your needs. It will get an IP address via DHCP, but it's
recommended you run it within a NAT or visible to the host OS only
since it is vulnerable to attacks.

I'm on VMWare Fusion 7.1.x, could that be the issue?

Best Answer

This is a consolidation of the comment stream above.

Jons issue was that he was using the wrong type of network adapter inside of VMware. The VM in question was not receiving an IP address so when he would go to scan it using nmap, he was not seeing the virtual machine.

The solution was to make sure both VM's we're using NAT instead of bridged mode so they could communicate with each other each other.

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I have same problem, but these solutions was not fixed my issues. However I have found a blog post from artykul8, what fixed fixed all of my issues!

http://artykul8.com/2012/06/vmware-performance-enhancing/

Tweak: Disable memory swap files .vmem files

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

Unfortunately this parameter does not work for VMware Player, as it always creates virtual machine’s full memory swap file. For VMware Fusion on Mac and Linux instead of mainMem.useNamedFile you have to set mainMem.backing flag.

mainMem.backing = "swap"

Tweak: Choose the right disk controller and specify SSD

Instead of the latest SATA AHCI controller choose LSI Logic SAS controller with SCSI disk for Windows guest OS, or PVSCSI for other types of OS. Unfortunately SATA AHCI on VMware has the lowest performance out of the three controllers and highest CPU overhead (see the references on the topic at the end). In addition to choosing the right controller, if your host disk is SSD you can explicitly specify the disk type as SSD to guest OS.

scsi0:0.virtualSSD = 1

Tweak: Disable log files for VM

logging = "FALSE"

Alternatively you can specify a different location to store the log file, if you ever need them:

log.filename = "c:\Windows\Temp\vm1.log"

Tweak: Other Disk & Memory I/O Performance Optimization

Disable memory trimming:

MemTrimRate = "0"

Disable page sharing:

sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"

Disable scale down of memory allocation:

MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"

Tweak: Disabling Snapshots

Disable snapshots if you are not using them and prefer full backups:

snapshot.disabled = "TRUE"

Tweak: Disable Unity Mode

Unity might be a great feature for running virtual desktops operating systems, but it is not the most useful for virtualizing server OS. An annoying sign of enabled unity is GuestAppsCache or caches folder with a large number of files and subfolders. In order to disable it for your VM add the following lines:

isolation.tools.unity.disable = "TRUE"
unity.allowCompositingInGuest = "FALSE"
unity.enableLaunchMenu = "FALSE"
unity.showBadges = "FALSE"
unity.showBorders = "FALSE"
unity.wasCapable = "FALSE"

Best Answer

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