There are many places on the internet that talk about configuring your computer to use a local loopback network adapter so that Guest OS’s via hack of the hosts file can point at something like “http://dev.myemployer.com” and really see the Host OS. I was running into a squirrely problem where my setup worked perfectly at work, but at home was jacked.
The default IP address for the Loopback adapter is 192.168.0.1 which works fine at work (non-routable IP that means nothing to that network), at home though it conflicts with my DSL modem which holds the prestigious spot in the network of being the only device whose local network address you CAN’T change and would cause my computer to attempt to resolve all domain names through that adapter. After going into Network Connections in Vista and trying to get the Loopback adapter to bind exclusively to 172.16.0.1 (another non-routable IP address that I was told is compatible with the work network as well) and having it bind to both the new address and the old 192.168.0.1 I was getting pretty pissed. I use a Virtual PC Guest running XP to occasionally do maintenance on a VB 6 back-office application and also to test my employer’s website in IE 6 which we still support. Both of these things are nearly impossible on Vista. This was making it impossible to do certain work at home (such as debugging a VB6 issue during a 2am deployment).
The solution to my problem came at the very top of this blog post:
netsh interface ip set address "Local Area Connection 3" static 172.16.0.1 255.255.255.0
A lot of cussing for such a small command. I didn’t just type it blind, neither should you if you try to use it. I would start at “netsh help” and work my way up from there (I actually did).
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