Virtual Appliance Marketplace

Average user Rating:7 Customer Ratings (Login to rate)


Netfilter based NAT box - easily share your internet connection, without changing your network configuration.

Features

Collegiate:
Yes

One-line Description:
Netfilter based NAT box - easily share your internet connection, without changing your network configuration.

Filename:
vmware-nat-appliance.zip

Size Compressed:
4

Allocated Memory:
32

VMware Tools Installed?:
No

Operating System:
Floppy Linux - kernel 2.4.29

Torrent?:
No

Applications:
tinyproxy version 1.6.3 - HTTP proxy, GPL
iv version 0.38 - tiny vi like text editor, GPL

Description:
0. If you have difficulties to download this appliance via bit torrent, you can get it clicking on the following links: version 1.0 (4.12MB) / version 1.1 (4.93MB) / version 1.0.1 (4.12MB)
1. Configuring firewalls in order to share an Internet connection is not a trivial task for non-technical users, and a pre-configured, light-weight ICS appliance can be handy in many scenarios:
- a Wi-Fi signal is not good (in a hotel, airport, conference) and only cards from certain vendors can catch it – and you happen to know the person with connectivity;
- there is no free Wi-Fi available (in a hotel or airport) and you want to minimize the cost to access the Internet by sharing the connection (and its cost) with your colleagues;
- there is only one port of wired connection, and Wi-Fi is not available (but many machines needs connectivity);
- you know how to configure Windows ICS, but the IP that you got is in 192.168.0.0 subnet (so you cannot use Windows ICS).
2. One of design objectives was to keep the size (storage) of the appliance low and for initial tests and configuration an existing floppy based Linux distribution (floppyfw) was used. Unfortunately it was not possible to finish a custom made floppy Linux with vmware-tools in it. Anticipating IP address conflicts, 3 sets of floppies are provided:
- nat-10.img is configured to use 10.255.254.0 internal network;
- nat-172.img is configured to use 172.31.254.0 internal network;
- nat-192.img is configured to use 192.168.254.0 internal network.
The default floppy is nat-172.img, but it can be easily changed by editing the vmware appliance configuration file (vmnat.vmx).
In short, there is no optimization in this version of appliance, but downloading an appliance of about 4.12MB it is possible to start a NAT in virtually any network environment. If the appliance is broken into 3 parts, each supporting a subnet in different class, the size of an individual appliance goes below 2MB.
3. The appliance is configured to use VMware NAT in the first NIC, and bridged in the second NIC. The network should be bridged to the internal network (e.g. 100BaseTX, cross-over connection between 2 laptops). The appliance runs a dhcp server, so it is just a matter of starting the appliance, connect machines and access the Internet.
If static configuration is necessary, gateway and DNS should be 10.255.254.1, 172.31.254.1 or 192.168.254.1 (according to the floppy image used). Netmask is 255.255.255.0 in all cases.
4. OS based on floppyfw available at http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/ - General Public License
5. The IEEE 802.11 (wireless) protocol specifies that a wireless NIC cannot send packets with a different MAC address than its own. Because of that, bridged network is harder in wireless environments. Each virtual NIC on VMs has its own MAC address (that is different from the real wireless NIC’s MAC address). In principle, packets generated on VMs cannot be transmitted by the physical WLAN NIC. So VMware sends/receives VMs' packets using the real wireless NIC's MAC address - the host and the VMs appear as having the same MAC address. This appliance does not work if its NIC connected to the private network (the one without Internet connectivity) is bridged to a wireless NIC. The main problem is that packets from this appliance's clients do not have the appliance's IP address (clients will try to access any machine in the Internet), and host machine's MAC address is used instead of appliance's MAC address. VMware will not deliver those packets to the appliance since the destination IP address does not match. An updated version that includes a http proxy (based on tinyproxy) is available in order to cover wireless scenarios (version 1.1). Clients will need to configure web browsers to use the proxy server running on 172.31.254.1 (or 10.255.254.1 or 192.168.254.1 according to the floopy image used) port 8888.
6. A tiny text editor (iv version 0.38) is included in version 1.1. It helps changing configuration parameters of the appliance. In order to make your changes permanent, you need to edit the files in the floopy image. You can do so by mounting the floopy (#mount -t vfat /dev/fd0u1680 /mnt). The text editor has a vi like interface, and is invoked issuing #iv
7. Version 1.0.1 uses 1.44MB format floppy disks.

Technical Specifications

Operating System:

Floppy Linux - kernel 2.4.29

VMware Tools installed: No

Size: 4MB

Allocated Memory (RAM): 32

Applications Installed:

tinyproxy version 1.6.3 - HTTP proxy, GPL

iv version 0.38 - tiny vi like text editor, GPL

Virtual Appliance Account Information