The excellent example given here is good, but it doesn’t match the IP address range my VMware Fusion was using by default, and I stupidly used the same fixed addresses. Sadly, it seems ISC’s DHCPd will simply give out dynamic addresses if you try to use it to assign addresses for which it doesn’t have configured on it’s own interface.

For example, my vmnet8/dhcpd.conf had this in it:

subnet 192.168.216.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.216.128 192.168.216.254;
option broadcast-address 192.168.216.255;
option domain-name-servers 192.168.216.2;
option domain-name “localdomain”;
option routers 192.168.216.2;
}

And I was trying to follow the above example, so I did something like this:

# Static addresses for VMs - gbg, 5/24/2008
host dargo {
hardware ethernet 00:0c:29:56:74:65;
fixed-address 172.16.253.10;
}

And kept banging my head as over and over again it kept assigning a dynamic address from the 192.168.216.x range .. finally, after much debugging I finally figured out the trick:

host dargo {
hardware ethernet 00:0c:29:56:74:65;
fixed-address 192.168.216.10;
}

Now, it assigns it perfectly. Much thanks to thirdbIT for taking the time and effort to post this information, hopefully I can give something back if someone can learn from my stupid mistake.

Cheers,
Greg

I’m in a similar position (Linux based development via VMware on a Mac Pro), and having static IPs keeps things nice and predictable.

Did I understand your question correctly?