Tip: Getting the Windows VM to See the Mac's IP

[wikitect]

Running EA on a Windows VM adds a few potential wrinkles, particularly on a laptop where the network environment keeps changing. This is important if you want to use EA with a MySQL DBMS where the MySQL is running on the Mac and not on the VM i.e. you can't use 'localhost' in the ODBC connection settings.

The solution is to create another network adapter for the VM which is tied to host-only mode and provides the link from the VM back to the host machine. There's a very good description of the problem and solution at http://communities.vmware.com/message/860708#860708

This doesn't, of course, apply if you're using Crossover where you can use the Mac's localhost - but then again it doesn't create a VM.

[wikitect]

The trick above with VM Fusion does allow the VM to see the Mac's localhost so with this I can now use http://fabrosaurus.local in the VM to get to 127.0.0.1 on the Mac.

In order to get the MySQL ODBC connection working to MAMP on the Mac I also had to

* add a rule to the Windows firewall software
* add a MySQL user on the Mac in the form 'username'@'172.x.y.z' where the 172.x.y.z is the IP address of the VM to allow remote (as far as the host is concerned) access to the MySQL server
* give the 172.x.y.z MySQL user the necessary permissions

With this done it works a treat - front end Sparx EA in Windows but decent DBMS in MySQL backed up with all the other MySQL dbs