I’m working from the in-laws’ house today, so I need to access the same networking stuff I do from home. I have Tunnelblick running OpenVPN on my OS X laptop to provide access to my home and office servers from here. All that works fine for my OS X apps but it doesn’t carry over into my VMware Fusion sessions. Those sessions treat themselves as independent devices and therefore don’t route through my VPN.
I was scratching my head yesterday trying to figure out a way my VMware session of Zenoss could use the VPN like everything else when I recalled Wade’s excellent loopback trick. I set my VMware session to use NAT networking, which allowed it to use the VPN but also gave the Zenoss session a non-routable IP address. Normally a non-routable IP address would seal the session off from the outside world, but Wade’s trick worked beautifully. I assigned a similar non-routable IP address as an alias to OS X’s loopback interface and voila! I could instantly access VMWare from my Firefox browser!
Man, it really pays to know good geeks. Thanks for the tip, Wade!