This all started with Subversion throwing a wobbly and not letting me see my repository in my Virtual PC (VPC) shared folder. It reported the file system as RAW even though it would work fine in the host and if I looked at a hotcopy of the repository it was fine. I decided, after the problem “went away”, that I should move away from shared folders (they’re terribly slow).

To do this required installing the Microsoft Loopback Adapter on the host and installing Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) for the new network adapter on the main NIC (currently the WiFi card although I should really bridge that with the ethernet network card). I could ping from host to guest and vice versa but that was all. Finally discovered it was ZoneAlarm (ZA) on the host being an arse. Even after you’ve added the new network as a trusted zone you have to lower the Internet Zone Security to medium. There is a setting in the, almost invisible, Advanced tab on the Firewall config page that is supposed to allow ICS but that doesn’t make any difference.

Anyway, now I have a mapped drive in my guest to my host data drive and it’s a lot faster than before. I’ll have to see if changing the Shared networking (NAT) network adaptor in the VPC settings makes any difference to the Local connection for my virtual network server setup.