Qemu Networking

2022-01-05

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Last year I built a personal virtualization server. I used VMWare on it for a short time, but because the machine had an AMD processor, I was stuck on ESXI version 6.7. I decided early in the year to switch to Qemu using Linux KVM, but for months I was stuck on configuring the network adapter properly.

In my home network I have a NAS with several terabytes of storage. I wanted my virtual machines to be able to access the NAS, so I needed them to be on the same LAN. I have very little knowledge about networking, and every tutorial I read about bridging was Greek to me.

Last week, a friend finally found and sent me a link to an article I could understand. The trick was to remove the primary network interface on the host machine, set up a bridge there instead, and have the host itself connect to the bridge along with the guests. The steps to do it were frustratingly simple, and I felt silly to not figure it out before, but I was mostly just glad to get LAN networking to function.

With this step completed, I've already finished some projects in the pipeline that had stalled, and I have a few more I'm contemplating. One is a self-hosted Fediverse server using Pleroma; another is a dedicated Urbit node; a third possibility is a semi-private BitTorrent tracker. I'm excited to play with this new setup.

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[Last updated: 2022-01-05]