Perhaps someone else has experienced what I related below and can 
comment -- SL 7x.

1.  Over break, an SL7x machine I had configured for a colleague had 
ceased to work.  There was a power outage and upon reboot, the Dell BIOS 
was not recognizing the Nvidia video card -- somehow the Dell BIOS had 
changed state.  Upon physical removal of the Nvidia card and yum erase 
of the relevant Nvidia X11 driver RPMs, X11 was working, but now there 
was no network connectivity.  I routinely run gkrellm to get a quick 
view of machine function; in this case, the 802.3 NIC was transmitting 
but not receiving any response from the central DHCP server.  This was 
working before the break (no static IPs generally are allowed by the 
university IT to centralize and police all services, both for 802.11 and 
802.3) .  After some investigation, I discovered that the DHCP, etc., 
services were no longer trusted by the SL7 firewall.  I reconfigured to 
trusted.  The 802.3 NIC that had been identified by gkrellm as eml now 
is P2P1 and the system connected; the end user was satisfied.  The 
central IT claims to have made no changes (no new CA, etc.).  Any ideas 
as what might have happened?  Could Network Manager have activated?  For 
802.3, I prefer to use a manual configuration, not NetworkManager.

2.  The other issue concerns VMware and VirtualBox -- not EL per se, but 
someone on this list may have experience with the problem. Because of a 
lack of licensing funds, I am using VMware Player and VirtualBox (not 
simultaneously).    My default is VirtualBox, but if necessary and as a 
test, VMWave Player.  Both are running images of MS Win 7 Pro that are 
simply the transformation of one virtual machine guest file format to 
the other.  Neither connects to the 802.11 host NIC and thus neither has 
Internet connectivity (a separate matter).  Both have bidirectional 
shared folders with the host.  Both have the extension packs, tool sets, 
etc., installed as specified by each.  VMware is able to use all USB 
devices that I connect to the host.  However, VirtualBox is not, 
producing an error that has been observed many times on posts I found on 
the web (Failed to create a proxy device for the USB device. (Error: 
VERR_READ_ERROR) ).   Has anyone on this list observed the VirtualBox 
USB issue?  USB 2 service is installed in for VirtualBox, vboxusers has 
the correct user entry, etc.  Some USB devices work, others do not -- 
but the same device that did not work for VirtualBox did work for 
VMWare.   Note that I must use MS Win to work with these devices as the 
application software for the device in question is *NOT* available for 
linux, the device is proprietary (no source code available), and 
CrossOver/Wine does not support USB -- forcing the use of a VM running a 
MS Win guest.

Yasha Karant


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