Network problems with Linux in VMWare Server
Lately I had troubles with my Debian Etch installation running in a VMWare server on a Windows 2003 SBS. I had to reboot the guest system multiple times until the eth0 network interface could establish a connection. It seems that this hat something to do with the system choosing the wrong of to network modules.
On startup the pcnet32 and the vmxnet modules where loaded (which I could see in /var/log/messages and with lsmod). I tried to change /etc/modules.conf by adding alias eth0 vmxnet or alias eth0 pcnet32 but that did not help.
Based on these two sites I tried to add EthernetX.virtualDev = vmxnet (I set X to 0 for the first and only network interface) in the .vmx file of the virtual machine and then to add the alias eth0 vmxnet in /etc/modules.conf - and that did the trick.
