Hi. Past two days I have had the opportunity to try Kali Linux 2.0 (Sana) in my Parallels and when I tried to do apt-get update and apt-get upgrade as well as apt-get dist-upgrade, the connection is really slow. I was getting about 15KB/s download speed and my Internet connection speed is actually about 3-5MB/s. Which means, my download speed should be 250-600 KB/s. This is really frustrating.

I tried investigating the problem. At first, I thought this has to be something wrong with the repository. So i changed the repo to a different mirror. Even on the nearest mirror to my country, the connection still looks shitty. Never mind, let's try another one. Still not working. The day goes on and finally i ended up trying 5 different mirrors with no luck. Holy crap, i said to myself, this has to be something i overlooked. I changed the DNS to Google public DNS too but still, that didn't make anything better.

I opened up Iceweasel (a Firefox clone that is preinstalled in Kali - Firefox can't be included for some licensing issue they said) and try to run speed test by going to speedtest.net. Oh crap, I don't even have Flash plugin installed. Should I install it? Hell no, I won't do that. Flash is dead. Killed by series of non-stop emerging vulnerabilities. I should download Chrome and observe the speed test using it.

While downloading Google Chrome deb file, i noticed that the download speed won't go pass 40 KB/s. WHATT?? And now I am sure that this has something to do with my connection speed. So, I try to download some random stuff using my Chrome in Mac OS X and there it is. THE DOWNLOAD SPEED IS FINE! ~500 KB/s as usual.

Now I know that my Internet connection speed is fine and Kali Linux repos mirrors are fine, but something is capping my bandwidth in Kali Linux. Is it Parallels? So I shut down the virtual machine and checked the settings. There it is. After changing some setting in Network section, my capped connection speed problem solved. Because I don't find the solution via googling around, I posted the solution here.

Problematic settings

This is the problematic settings. The NIC Type is set to Realtek RTL8029AS and type is Wi-fi. I believed other settings below those two matters.

Correct settings

And this is the correct settings that solved the problem for me. NIC Type is Virtio network adapter and type is shared network.

PS: I've tried playing around with the settings a bit and i found that changing the type to bridged, wi-fi and so on doesn't matter. The only problem is NIC Type and you have to choose that right.