How do I get networking to work with kvm?

[epsilon72]

I need help.

I've been trying for the past few hours to get networking to work with kvm, to no avail. All of the guides that I can find are completely different from eachother (bridge? tun? vde? iptables? what?) but after following each one to the letter I get the same outcome: No network connection with kvm.

So, I'm looking for a single definitive guide of how to get this thing going. I know next to nothing about network interfaces other than how to assign an ip to my network card, and point it at a gateway.

My kernel is set up to use masquerade/iptables, since I've seen that in more than one guide, but beyond configuring the kernel to use it I really don't have any idea what to do. If anyone can give me the exact options they pass to kvm to get their networking online that would help as well, because all of the examples I've seen are slightly different.

Has anyone been in my situation (total network/kvm newbie) and got this thing working? I'd rather not use vmware if I don't have to...

[Hu]

You are finding conflicting answers because KVM has multiple distinct ways to do networking. For each NIC visible in the guest, you can: use the Qemu user socket stack, use a tap device and have the host masquerade the traffic, use a tap device and have the host bridge the traffic, or use VDE to connect to other guests. Different choices are useful for different scenarios. The user socket stack is the easiest to set up, but is very limited in the control it gives you both for restricting guest network access and for permitting the guest to run servers. Tap devices give you flexible control over how the guest interacts with the network, but require more configuration.

Since you already have NAT support, I suggest you go the route of creating a tap device, attaching the guest to it, and setting the host to NAT the guest. The following should work, but this is from memory:

# emerge -n sys-apps/usermode-utilities
# tunctl -u user-who-runs-kvm tap0
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
$ kvm -net nic -net tap,ifname=tap0 other-kvm-options

This should get you to the point that the guest is just like any other machine hidden behind a NAT, so the Gentoo home router guide can help you configure the NAT settings appropriately. Where that guide refers to the router, treat it as the KVM host. Where the guide refers to systems inside the LAN, treat it as the KVM guest.

Feel free to post back if you still need help, or if the steps I gave above do not work.

[epsilon72]

I'll read the gentoo routing guide, since I haven't gotten it to work yet.
I ran:

[schnake]

I struggled with networking KVM recently, too. KVM's build in "Usermode" Network works (but only TCP, no UDP, no ICMP, ...). I also tried the "Bridges" way, but bridges do not always play nice with WLAN interfaces (especially when managed via WICD or NetworkManager).

The solution I finally choosed is "KVM switched networking". A "software switch" (via VDE) to which the VM's connect, and having that switch transparently providing Forwarding/NAT/DHCP to the guest OS. A Gentoo specific guide is at http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/KVMwithVDE and for general information see e.g. http://wiki.virtualsquare.org/index.php/VDE_Basic_Networking

I followed the Gentoo specific "KVM with VDE" guide, but put config and commands in init scripts / configs. That way you simply add the "kvmlan" init script to the default runlevel and are done (and never need to remember )

/etc/conf.d/net - Add definition for the tap0 interface

[schnake]

Ah, and if you still prefer to go "Bridges"...

Hint: The error

[Hu]