I want to allow my VMWare machine to force the virtual network it's on into promiscuous mode so I can play around with honeyd. I received an error message that told me to go to http://vmware.com/info?id=161 to allow this behavior. Based on their advice, I did:

$ groupadd promiscuous
$ cat /etc/group | grep promiscuous
promiscuous:x:1002:robert
$ usermod -a -G promiscuous robert
$ id robert
uid=1000(robert) gid=1000(robert) groups=1000(robert),....,1002(promiscuous)
$ chgrp newgroup /dev/vmnet8
$ chmod g+rw /dev/vmnet8
$ ls -l /dev/vmnet8
crw-rw---- 1 root promiscuous 119, 8 2012-03-29 10:29 /dev/vmnet8

Looks like I gave RW permission to the promiscuous group, and added myself. Except that VMWare still gives me an error message that says I cannot enter promiscuous mode. To try out the group thing, I tried:

$ echo "1" >/dev/vmnet8
bash: /dev/vmnet8: Permission denied

That really surprised me: It makes me think that I still haven't properly given myself the correct permissions... What am I missing?