http://www.cs.uu.nl/technical/services/ssh/putty/puttyfw.html Use the instructions at the above URL to ssh to shasta.cs.unm.edu and create a port forwarding for the port you want to connect to with RDP. You should replace 3128 with the RDP port for the VM you want to connect to, e.g., 6221 for Suspiria or 6222 for Woods. On a Linux machine, just do, e.g.,: ssh -L 6221:localhost:6221 shasta.cs.unm.edu Now you should be able to use a Remote Desktop Client and connect to that port on 127.0.0.1 and see the console for your VM, In Linux, it's: rdesktop localhost:6221 The first thing you'll want to do is change to a root shell: sudo su - Enter the password that you used to log in again. Then create accounts for all your group members and make sure they're in the admin group: adduser --ingroup admin theirusername Where "theirusername" is the username they want. They have to type the password twice and then say Y for yes at the end. https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/network-configuration.html You'll want to follow the instructions for "Static IP Address Assignment" at the above URL, ignoring the gateway for now. Next, delete the eth0 configuration and configure your eth1 interface for a static IP address. As root, or using sudo, you'll need to edit "/etc/network/interfaces" and make it look like mine, but with your own IP addresses, of course. Suspiria looks like this: ... # The primary network interface auto eth1 iface eth1 inet static address 192.168.122.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 ... And Woods looks like this: ... # The primary network interface auto eth1 iface eth1 inet static address 192.168.122.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 ... Then, change your hostname from ubuntu to the name of the machine in all lowercase, by editing /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts. Just remove the cs.unm.edu stuff. Here's what /etc/hosts on Suspiria looks like: 127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.0.1 suspiria # The following lines... ... Do not shut your virtual machine down. If you do I can power it back up for you remotely, but it's better to leave it on and only reboot by using the "reboot" command. You should not use the "shutdown" command. As root, type "reboot" and your virtual machine should reboot. After you've rebooted both of them they should have the correct names (not "ubuntu") when you log into them, and you should be able to ssh from one to the other by IP address. I.e., they should be connected by a layer 2 connection now and should be able to talk to each other, but they will not be on the Internet yet. Note that we have note yet set up DNS or statically assigned any host names other than the local one, so SSH will pause for a timeout period while it tries to do some DNS that it can't resolve. Now you can use the command "tcpdump -i eth1" to see how they talk to each other over their link. You can look at the ARP cache with "arp -n" and clear it by using "arp -d 192.168.x.x" where x.x in the IP address is replaced depending on the ARP cache entry you want to clear. Note that tcpdump tends to pause for a while after it starts, so you have to run it for a long time and use shift+PgUp or dump it to a file and look at it there. You should play with it a bit and see how the ARP cache and ARP requests and replies work.