[CentOS] wlan and macvtap?

Darod Zyree

darodzyree at gmail.com
Thu Jul 26 18:14:37 UTC 2012


Greetings,

This is my fist time posting to a mailing list.

For the past few days I have been trying to mimic my former windows
workstation with a centos 6.3 workstation at work.
I have gotten really far but am now facing an issue I cant seem to
solve on my own.

My former workstation had vmware for running my virtual machines.
Most of the time I would run just two virtual machines, but sometimes
more, and each virtual machine would have access to one of my hosts
network interfaces.
I have two, one connected by cable to the corporate lan and one
wireless interface connected to an access point which gives me and my
colleagues direct access to the internet.

After having read some documentations I decided upon using "macvtap"
in VEPA mode for my guest virtual machines.
This, to me, seem to be the most clean solution without having to
create bridges, this way when I start a virtual machine the macvtap
interface is created automatically.
Plus I have read that NetworkManager does not play nicely (yet) with
bridge interfaces and the virtual machines are accessible from their
connected network environments.

This did not work at first because I had not yet put my physical
network interface in to promiscuous mode.
Was I wrong in expecting this to be done automatically? Since my
macvtap interface requires this to work "properly"?

After having set the corporate lan network interface, in to
promiscuous mode my virtual machine received an IP address and all was
well.

However this did not work for my wlan interface after having done the same.
It too was set in to promiscuous mode but the virtual machine is not
receiving an ip address from the DHCP server, which is the access
point.
I changed the network settings on the virtual machine from DHCP to
manual but that too did not work: no network communication.

Does macvtap not work with wlan interfaces? Or am I doing something wrong.

I am using centos 6.3, with kvm, libvirt and virt-manager, have not
used any none standard repository for installation or updates.


Regards,
Darod Zyree



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