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This code is obsolete

This was handy in its time, but after upgrading to a machine that can run a bunch of VMs simultaneously without getting slow, I’m finding it easier to keep a Linux VM running all the time on VMware’s NAT subnet, and ssh -R to that. ttylinux is especially handy for this.

If anyone is interested in doing anything with this code, I have a few notes:

  • When I wrote this, I knew about vmrun, but didn’t realize that the VIX API was available on the mac in VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Public/vix-perl.tar.gz. There are header files and a shared library in that package. If you interface that with Python, you can create a VIX connection to the VM and issue many commands on that connection all from the same process, which would be much faster than calling vmrun over and over.
  • The code assumes that a .vmx file has the same basename as its containing directory, but that’s not the case if the VM was copied. vmreflect still works if you specify the full path of the .vmx file, but it would be nice if it handled that automatically.
  • There is a bug in tcpr that causes it to crash if a TCP connection is half-closed. I’m not sure if that is a bug in the underlying Python library, or in tcpr.

vmreflect: A TCP Proxy Reflector for Windows Virtual Machine Guests

You’re developing a dynamic website on your MacBook, using Django or Ruby on Rails or something. The development website is being served as HTTP at localhost:8000. You need to test it in Internet Explorer. But you don’t want to open up the firewall on your MacBook.

Mac firewall settings dialog with “Block all incoming connections” checked

vmreflect sets up a tunnel so that localhost:8000 in a Windows virtual machine running under VMware Fusion forwards to localhost:8000 on your Mac, without doing anything to your firewall, and without opening any new listening ports on your Mac. It does this by automatically installing and configuring TCP Proxy Reflector by Alain Spineux. vmreflect starts a forwarding process on your Mac, connects it to a listening port on the VM, and tunnels traffic between the two.

Using vmreflect

  1. Turn off the firewall on the Windows VM. If it’s a website-testing-only VM that you always keep behind VMware’s NAT, this shouldn’t be a problem.
  2. Make sure there’s a password set in the Windows VM. The VMware API doesn’t allow a program to modify anything inside a virtual machine unless the program first authenticates with a valid username and password. vmreflect uses default values of Administrator and test.
  3. Run vmreflect NAME-OF-VM.
Andrew Neitsch