If DHCPD does not work on the host machine after you install VMware Workstation, your DHCP server might have been configured to respond to DHCP requests from clients on any network interface present on the machine. When host-only networking is configured, an additional network interface VMnet1 is marked up and available for use and dhcpd may notice this additional interface.
In such cases, some dhcpd implementations abort if their configuration files do not include a subnet specification for the interface even if dhcpd is not supposed to respond to messages that arrive through the interface.
The best solution to this problem is to add a line to the dhcpd configuration file of the form:
subnet <net>.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {}
where <net> is the network number assigned to your host-only network; for example, the network number for your host-only network could be similar to 192.168.0.
Adding this line to the dhcpd configuration file informs dhcpd about the host-only network and tells it explicitly not to respond to any DHCP requests it sees coming from the host-only network.
An alternative solution is to explicitly state the set of network interfaces that you want dhcpd to listen to each time you start the program. For example if your machine has one Ethernet interface, eth0, then each time you start dhcpd you would list it on the command line rather than have it probe for all available network interfaces. For example, use the following command:
dhcpd eth0
If these solutions do not work for your DHCP server program, then it is likely out of date. You can try upgrading to a more current version such the Version 2 DHCP software available from the ISC (http://www.isc.org).
© 2002 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.