The basic situation that I have is a dedicated server running CentOS 5.4 At the moment I have one VM running Ubuntu 9.0.4. Later on, I will want to add another VM running Windows Server 2003 but at the moment I am focusing on getting Ubuntu up and running. The Ubuntu installation is working fine but I'm seriously struggling to get port forwarding working so that I can access websites to be hosted on the Ubuntu VM. As a newbie to Linux, I am confused about the relationship between IPTables and VMWare's own port forwarding. Here's what I've tried so far. The IP of my server is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and the provider support have told me that the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0, the gateway address is xxx.xxx.xxx.1 and the network address is xxx.xxx.xxx.0. (Those latter two surprise me a bit, I expected private gateway/network address rather than public ones.) First of all I tried Bridged Networking but had no success at all in communicating with the machine other than through the VMware console. I tried pinging it from the host (using ssh into the host) but no joy; also no Inernet access from the VM. I changed the interfaces configuration from DHCP to Static, using a static address of 192.168.1.100 and setting the gateway to xxx.xxx.xxx.1 as advised by the provider. No real difference, still cannot ping the guest from the host or vice versa and no Internet access from the guest. Then I tried NAT. The host automatically set the IP address to 192.168.132.128 with a gateway of 192.168.132.2 Now the guest has Internet access out and when I do a VNC to the host and open Firefox with 192.168.132.128 I can see the hosted website okay but I still cannot get into it from outside. I mentioned that I'm a bit confused about IPtables and VMware port forwarding, what I meant is that I'm not sure whether IPtable forwarding should be set to the IP address of the guest interface (192.168.132.128 in this case) or the gateway address 192.168.132.2 . I have a feeling that I'm missing something very simple here, can anybody tell me what it is?