Accessing VPN from Parallels
I ran into a rather annoying problem with my virtual PCs tonight. I am trying to test a web application running on my staging box in the office. I’m connected to the corporate network via VPN and using the dev box’s private URL. This all works great, until I tried to get there from PC in Parallels.
When I was running my own DNS server, I didn’t have this problem, because I just copied the corporate domain into mine and served as a secondary provider. However, I got tired of updating it manually and started using OpenDNS (which is great, BTW). Now when I fire up the craptastic IE 6 and type in the dev box’s URL, it goes right to OpenDNS’s “not loading” error page. Damn.
I had nightmarish visions of messing with registry entries to wrangle the DNS server order into something that would work. Or rebooting my MacBook Pro repeatedly until the PC’s NIC got a connection (anyone familiar with that fun little bug?). However, the fix turned out to be exceedingly simple: edit the hosts file on the PC. I added an entry for the dev box and voila! I can now run tests in the favorite of all favorite browsers (known in our office as Stupid IE).