Im having a strange networking problem with a Debian (6) VMWare virtual machine on my Mac. Around 15 minutes after starting it up, I can no longer SSH into, view websites served from, or ping the VM.I usually run the VM in headless mode, using vmrun -T fusion start VIRTUALMACHINEPATH nogui, but the problem occurs when I start the virtual machine via VMWare.app too.When I use ifconfig to check the machines IP address once the network connections have failed (which I do via the GUI  launching VMWare.app after the server is inaccessible in headless mode gives me a GUI access to the server), the following line is missing: inet addr:192.168.231.137  Bcast:192.168.231.255  Mask:255.255.255.0(This line is present when I boot up; it disappears after the network connections go down.)This started happening yesterday, seemingly for no reason  the VMs been running fine for a couple of weeks. I installed rsync on the VM yesterday, and was writing some Python code that used subprocess to start Xvfb and Selenium Server. I dont know if that code somehow managed to permanently bork networking on the VM.Ive tried copying the .vdmx files and opening them in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The network issue doesnt seem to happen there (i.e. the inet addr line in ifconfig stays present for over an hour); however, VirtualBox VMs dont by default make the virtual machine accessible on the network, whereas VMWare seems to do so. I havent figured out how to turn on NAT port forwarding for incoming connections to the VirtualBox VM in the same way that VMWare is set up. (Both my VMWare and VitualBox virtual machines use NAT for networking.)Im a total networking idiot, so I dont know if this is a VMWare issue, something Ive managed to do in Linux, or some sort of random external attack  hence the cross-posting.
Why does my Debian VMWare virtual machine lose all network connections ~15 minutes after boot?
linux;debian;networking;vmware