Hello, I'm Darren

A 169.XXX.XXX.XXX address takes the ‘work’ out of network

It has been on my to do list for some time to set up a new file server for our house. I have lots of files that I like to make sure are backed up and with a 128GB SSD it is nice to keep any non-essential files off my main machine and on a home network server.

Finally, over the weekend I finally found some time to get a file server up and running and came across a really annoying issue that I wanted to share in the hope it helps somebody else.

My file server is a 2010 Mac Mini running OSX 10.7 Lion Server that was previously my desktop machine connected directly to a gigabit router. I purchased Lion Server and uninstalled any software that wasn’t going to be used on the server.

I started copying files from the various back up sources throughout the house when suddenly the network connection to the machine was lost. After rebooting the router and the Mac Mini, everything was normal again so I continued copying files over and it happened again. This kept happening so I did a little investigation.

I discovered that the Mac Mini was struggling to maintain its IP from the DHCP server/router and kept reverting to a 169.XXX.XXX.XXX address and losing its 192.168.XXX.XXX address until everything was rebooted.

It was fine on the wi-fi but not on ethernet and after hours of tearing my hair out I stumbled across a post on the Apple Support forums with a user complaining of a similar problem.
It turns out that the problem was having VMWare Fusion installed on the machine and for some reason was causing network issues with the ethernet.

I remove VMWare and voila, problem solved.

This isn’t something I have ever come across before and I am hoping that my hours of frustration and digging around Apple Support forums will help somebody else out.