General :: Block A Virtual Machine From Connecting With A Website, From Outside The VM?

A couple of weeks ago, I completed a system upgrade that was motivated because I have to deploy Windows 7. I have to deploy it because my Windows development environment is getting very long in the tooth, and I have to become current again for a project of mine that is underway. So, yesterday, I deployed Windows 7 Professional in VMware 7 hosted on Mandriva 2010. With my new upgrade, I have a very capable quad-core athlon system with an NVidia 240GT video card, and it runs Aero quite nicely in the virtual machine. I do have to say that Windows 7 looks nice and isn't too annoying to use, except - of course - when I need to dig into it to change some setting or another.

Now, on Windows, for many years I have used Zone Alarm firewall rather than the Windows firewall, because ZA monitors and controls outgoing connections. I have used this on both my Win2K development system (virtual machine) AND my Win XP laptop to keep microsoft applications (notably media player) from calling the mother ship when I didn't think they should. It has worked well. So one of my first actions was to download the newest copy of ZA free firewall and deploy it on Windows 7, after disabling the Windows firewall. Well guess what. ZA doesn't stop Windows from calling the mother ship. I have all settings on ZA set to "ask" before allowing anything to contact the net, but I've been playing with some multimedia things and the microsoft software has been talking on the internet as happy as you please, and ZA hasn't asked me a single time if it could do so.

Of course, when I ran a few tests with ping and tracert, ZA asked me. Also, I had to fiddle with ZA settings a bit to get the Windows 7 to successfully talk to my LAN. But when Windows 7 wants to talk to microsoft, it talks regardless of what ZA says. Well, when you get down to it, this is one reason I have Windows running in a VM...I WILL be in control, regardless of what microsoft wants. Does anyone know of a tool that I could use from Mandriva to prevent a VMware client from talking to a website? I'd like to be able to easily enable/disable it so that I can let Win 7 talk to microsoft when I need for it to do so, but no other time. I'm using bridged networking in VMware so all my virtual machines have their own IP addresses, but of course all of them (as well as my host Linux system) go through the same network adapter. It seems to me that iptables would have to work for this, but I'm not at all sure how to set it up to do it given the bridge.