I recently installed Fedora 7 and VMware Server on top of that, to run a Windows XP guest system. I used bridged networking for the guest and wanted to use rdesktop to connect from the host to the guest OS, but I was unable to successfully establish a connection from the host to the guest. As it turned out, the host system could communicate with all other machines on the network successfully, and so could the guest system, but the host and guest could not talk to each other properly.
After harnessing the power of my favorite search engine, it appeared that checksum offloading might be to blame, so here's what i did:
I first checked whether checksum offloading was enabled:
[lutz@kasperletheater /]$ ethtool -k eth0
Offload parameters for eth0:
Cannot get device udp large send offload settings: Operation not supported
rx-checksumming: on
tx-checksumming: on
scatter-gather: on
tcp segmentation offload: on
udp fragmentation offload: off
generic segmentation offload: off
As you can see, it was. The next step was to disable this feature:
[lutz@kasperletheater /]$ sudo ethtool -K eth0 rx off tx off sg off tso off
Password:
[lutz@kasperletheater /]$ ethtool -k eth0
Offload parameters for eth0:
Cannot get device udp large send offload settings: Operation not supported
rx-checksumming: off
tx-checksumming: off
scatter-gather: off
tcp segmentation offload: off
udp fragmentation offload: off
generic segmentation offload: off
This seems to have solved the issue, as host and guest system can now successfully communicate.
