Ubuntu 11.10 on VMware Player - No network behind proxy

Question

I have VMWare Ubuntu 11.10 guest hosted on Win7. When behind a proxy, I am able to browse with chrome / firefox but all other network activity does not work (i.e. curl, system update, apt-get, etc.)

Running ifconfig returns:

eth0  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:0c:29:99:15:5a  
      inet addr:192.168.220.132  Bcast:192.168.220.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
      inet6 addr: fe80::20c:29ff:fe99:155a/64 Scope:Link
      UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
      RX packets:1966 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
      TX packets:1860 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
      RX bytes:1046661 (1.0 MB)  TX bytes:230761 (230.7 KB)
      Interrupt:19 Base address:0x2000 

lo    Link encap:Local Loopback  
      inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
      inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
      UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
      RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
      TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
      RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

I have set the proxy via the Network window and applied the settings globally (before doing that I was also unable to use web browsers). When I am not behind proxy, then everything works fine. If I ping some web site it does resolve the destination IP but ping itself doesn't work.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

Since your host is behind a proxy, you will need to activate "socks" through either the host or guest (I recommend the host).

Basically, only web browsers are often "set up" for utilizing proxies, to get all OTHER traffic to also pass through, you have to push all traffic through socks which in turn pushes it through the proxy for you.