[PLUG] Anyone have a cleaner way to do this?

[Jeff Moore]

Hi all!
 
    I am working to reinstall my edge system this weekend and had a quick question. I am replacing my old whitebox linux(redhat replica) with an Ubuntu Edgy system that will run VMware server(free edition). This way I will be able to do a little more experimenting on my edge and be able to quickly bring the network back up when the wife starts yelling. ;) 
    The question I have is this. VMware is bridging to my external interface(Groovy! Via their own bridging tech I think..?) and I want to leave the interface up so that my virtual machines can access the external lan but I want no external access to my VMware host server. I think I have a decent solution but it feels a bit clumbsy. Anyone know debian well enough to give me a little more elegant way to do this? 
    Righ now I have made sure that eth0 has a non routable address on the outside and then put a quick ifconfig command in the /etc/network/interfaces file to set it to have no IP address. This seems to work. My virtual machines can talk and I cannot access the host server via the network but again it just feels cheezy....  Feels like I am driving the car around the block just to roll up the windows.. Thanks for the help!
 
/etc/network/interfaces:
iface eth0 inet static
          address 192.168.0.1
          netmask 255.255.255.0
          up ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0
 
Jeff M