And then it dawned on me
Had to write this down. I’ve been trying to get up and going with KVM recently. I got a break from school and need KVM up on my home server so I can experiment with many other things. I read through a bunch of the libvirt documentation, specifically about virt-install, and then once I had a grasp I ran through some tutorials. Most of the tutorials I found out there and virt-install one-liners had me using a network option as follows:
--network bridge=virbr0
I eventually learned that that was not what I wanted to use for a server VM. But the thing is, I was trying to re-follow a guide where I needed to create a bridge network device on the host and link my primary ethernet one to it, so that the VMs could reside on the same network as the host. I anticipated making some changes that I admittedly didn’t understand, and thought I might break the network connection. In preparation I created a user/pass for my brother, whose house is where the server resides. That was wise, because sure enough, I broke it. But the odd part is that no sooner did I break it than the thought finally blazed into my brain that I’d been using the wrong bridge the entire time! I had physically created this new bridge ‘br0’ but constantly had been creating VMs and having them use this ‘virbr0’ one instead. Croike. It took me a few days to actually be able to sit down with my brother over the phone so I could get him to copy my backed-up network script back into place and get me going. I just got that done and finally now I’m up and going since I’m using the proper network device as my bridge.
Life is funny. I’ll be using this for my VMs from now on:
--network bridge=br0