I have installed a fresh 10.04 server onto a laptop on a home network as a VMware machine and set network connection to 'Bridged: connect directly to the physical network' from within VMware and rebooted the server. It then loses its IP address.

'dhclient eth0' says "No working leases in persistent database - sleeping" DHCP is working fine on the wi-fi router.

The laptop is wired to a wireless router and from there wirelessly to a desktop. Desktop and Laptop can ping each other from Windows.

I can ping the VM from Windows on the same laptop, but not from the desktop.

Strangely ping has started to resolve hostnames to IPv6 addresses and not IPv4. Don't know whether that's connected?

A kick in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. I've been an Ubuntu desktkop user for a few years, but new to ubuntu servers.