I updated VMware Player to the latest version (3.0) on my home machine last night[1]. Wanted to check out the latest version and get a first hand look at the new features.
I pointed it to my trusty Xubuntu “security” virtual machine and booted up. I ran into a snag pretty quickly though. Seemed that the client couldn’t get an IP address to get on the network.
I’ve seen and fixed this before. VMware Player seems to like to grab my Hamachi “personal VPN” network adapters instead of the local Ethernet one – it will never get an IP from the Hamachi network!
That’s when I hit the next snag: the new version of VMware Player doesn’t include the vmnetcfg network configuration that I’ve always used to fix this in the past. I poked around a bit but it wasn’t there and I didn’t see anything that looked like a replacement.
I ended up fixing this in a bit more of a low-tech fashion. I simply disabled the Hamachi adapter and then booted the VMware client. Client got an IP and I then re-enabled the Hamachi adapter.
Of course, after my low-tech solution I went looking for better options… Turns out I’m not the first one to notice that vmnetcfg went missing. I found discussion and the answer in a forum post:
The vmnetcfg.exe is included in the installer, but won’t be installed.
1. Run the installer with /e option. For example:
VMware-player-3.0.0-197124.exe /e .\extract
All contents will be extracted to “extract” folder.
2. Open “network.cab” and copy vmnetcfg.exe to your installation folder,
typically “C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player\”.
Well there you go. Even better.
[1] – Past mentions of VMware Player.
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October 29th, 2009 
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Thanks for the post!
Finding vmnetcfg.exe helped me a lot!
Strange they don’t extract it anymore.
This is very much appreciated, I can’t believe they keep hiding valuable tools like this.
Thank you! I was struggling with this for some time and now that I decided to solve it I found your post. Very Useful.
Wow…this was awesome solution. I am trying to get the bridged networking work for Guest OS(WIN XP) and read so much on google… everyone pointed to keep checking automatic bridging as a problem but no one tell a word about how to get there. Without this I would have banged my head with wall…lol Thanks so much for the great and very well explained solution..i wonder why VMware freeks hide this at first place…huh
I think that going to the Himachi adapter properties and turning VMWare Bridge Protocol off would also fix the problem.
You know? That’s likely a great alternative — and certainly simpler as well. Thanks!
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