Wednesday, August 22, 2007

vmware and a broadcom gigabit ethernet adapter

My Dell SC-420 has a Broadcom BCM-5751 adapter....any large-ish transfers from the host to a vmware guest is extremely slow, when it works at all!

These two posts point to issues with the vmware adapters and the tg3 broadcom driver:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=687712򧹠
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=551754򆭊

They also point to the solution which is:

ethtool -s eth0 autoneg off speed 100
ethtool -K eth0 sg off rx off tx off tso off

That seemed to fix it....

sshd as a socks 5 proxy & foxyproxy

This isn't new stuff, been around for a long time and been written about many times, but too cool to pass up.

If you have an ssh account on a server somewhere that you trust, that connection can be used to tunnel all your network traffic securely out to the internet....main use case probably while at internet cafe's.

OpenSSH has built-in support as a socks 5 proxy server. So, using putty for example, in the "tunnels" configuration setting, create a new entry with source port being the port you'll connect to on your local machine, leave destination text field empty and select "dynamic" as the destination. Now, make an ssh connection to the server - netstat should show that your local computer is listening on the source port you specified.

Now you can configure your browser (or whatever other application supports proxies) to point to localhost and the port you specified. Check your IP address before and after at http://www.dslreports.com/whois.

Now, to make life super simple, install the firefox plugin foxyproxy to make proxy switching a simple single click!