Hello Herbert, thank you for your reply! I got it working now. After suppling correct params for the build command like this vserver vs2 build \ -m debootstrap --context 1234 \ --hostname vs2 \ --interface eth0:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/26 \ --interface 0=eth0:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/26 \ --interface lo:127.0.0.1/32 \ -- -d lenny -m http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian it configured the guests network correctly. Now I have inside my guest: eth0 : IP and netmask correct eth0:0 IP and netmask correct lo But nevertheless your information helped me to understand more about the guest network configuration. > please avoid the 2.6.26 kernels, they are known-to-be-broken In which way are they broken? Do I have an alternative? I'm using the linux-image-2.6.26-1-vserver-686 as it is the Lenny standard vserver kernel after a fresh installation. > you usually do not specify 127.0.0.1 for a guest, > unless you exactly know what you are doing :) as you can read, I don't know what I'm doing :-) But why not use --interface lo:127.0.0.1/32 ? I use it to bind mysqld to 127.0.0.1:3306 BTW I have another problem now: I installed apache2 inside the guest and it cannot start up. Apache complains, that it cannot bind to 0.0.0.0:80 As there is no other services listening to port 80 and I cannot find any zombie pids from apache I'm not sure if it is still a networking problem or perhaps a result of the 2.6.26 kernel bug? Or is it me (= configuration problem)? What do you think? Have a nice time, Gerd