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Promiscuous Mode and Virtual Ethernet Adapters in a Guest Operating System

VMware Workstation does not allow the virtual Ethernet adapter to go into promiscuous mode unless the user running VMware Workstation has permission to make that setting. This follows the standard Linux practice that only root can put a network interface into promiscuous mode.

When you install and configure VMware Workstation, you must run the installation as root. VMware Workstation creates the vmnet0-vmnet3 devices with root ownership and root group ownership, which means that only root has read/write permissions to the devices.

To set the virtual machine's Ethernet adapter to promiscuous mode, you must launch VMware Workstation as root because you must have read/write access to the vmnetx device (for example, if you are using bridged networking you must have access to the /dev/vmnet0 device).

To grant selected other users read/write access to the vmnetx device, you can create a new group, add the appropriate users to the group and grant that group read/write access to the appropriate device. You must make these changes on the host operating system as root (su). For example, you can enter the following commands:

chgrp newgroup /dev/vmnet0
chmod g+rw /dev/vmnet0

where newgroup is the group that should have the ability to set vmnet0 to promiscuous mode.

If you want all users to be able to set the virtual Ethernet adapter (/dev/vmnet0 in our example) to promiscuous mode, you can simply run the following command on the host operating system as root.

chmod a+rw /dev/vmnet0

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