[TriLUG] KVM on a laptop

G.Wolfe Woodbury redwolfe at gmail.com
Sun Oct 14 23:37:16 EDT 2012


On 10/14/2012 09:28 PM, Joseph S. Tate wrote:
> I'm wondering if there is some advice to be had for running KVM on a
> laptop.  I'm currently running Fedora 17 with all SELinux garbage
> disabled.
> 
> I'm having problems with quite a few things:
> 
> When running NAT, I can't ssh or http to the guests from the host.  I
> suppose I have to set up firewall rules to forward to the virbr?
> Where do I do that?  Can I do it through virt-manager?
> 
> Since I couldn't figure out NAT and was under a deadline, I set up a
> bridged interface to my eth0.  With bridged networking, I had to drop
> iptables on the host before I could access the Internet from my
> guests.  This doesn't bode well for my confidence when I roam to a
> public wifi connection.  I had other problems with bridged networking,
> so I'm merely curious; are there iptables configurations that one can
> use to allow Internet access from guests while keeping iptables up?
> 
> With the bridge in place, when I un-dock my laptop, I have to drop br0
> before I can get my wifi to work because the routes don't get touched
> up when wifi comes up.  Network Manager seems not to know anything
> about bridged network devices.
> 
> Now that I've re-docked, Network Manager thinks I'm not connected to
> my wired network, even though I've bounced br0, eth0, and run "service
> network restart".  I am able to ping my router (once I disable my
> wifi).
> 
> What should I do instead?

Well, I would use VirtualBox-4.2.0 to handle the virtualization duties.
This is because its networking is well defined and documented.  I have
been playing with FC17 and FC18-Beta and am successful in getting to
servers running in the GuestOS (a variety of WindowsXP and gentoo guests)

You will need to set "Bridged Ethernet" in the Guests, and "port
forwarding" rules in the Guests to make external machines attach to the
Guests.

With Fedora you can use the "virtio net" device for faster speeds.

I have trouble in Fedora with using both wired and wireless connections
at the same time, so I have been using mostly Gentoo as the primary Host OS.

This is my $0.05 advice (inflation, ya know :-)

-- 
G.Wolfe Woodbury
redwolfe at gmail.com
Fedora proventesters



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