diff --git a/scripts/smoke-vm.sh b/scripts/smoke-vm.sh
index f04df4d..b7fee34 100755
--- a/scripts/smoke-vm.sh
+++ b/scripts/smoke-vm.sh
@@ -153,14 +153,19 @@ MAC_LOWER="$(echo "$MAC" | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z')"
 IP=""
 deadline=$((SECONDS + 150))
 while (( SECONDS < deadline )); do
+  # Capture-then-parse instead of piping directly into awk. `awk '... exit'`
+  # exits on first match, which SIGPIPEs the upstream arp-scan (exit 141).
+  # With `set -o pipefail` active that kills the whole script — exactly what
+  # happened the first time host-networking gave arp-scan real matches.
+  SCAN=""
   if command -v arp-scan >/dev/null 2>&1; then
-    IP="$(sudo arp-scan --localnet --quiet --ignoredups 2>/dev/null \
-          | awk -v m="$MAC_LOWER" 'tolower($2) == m { print $1; exit }')"
+    SCAN="$(sudo arp-scan --localnet --quiet --ignoredups 2>/dev/null || true)"
+    IP="$(awk -v m="$MAC_LOWER" 'tolower($2) == m { print $1; exit }' <<<"$SCAN")"
   fi
   if [[ -z "$IP" ]] && command -v nmap >/dev/null 2>&1; then
     sudo nmap -sn -T4 192.168.178.0/24 >/dev/null 2>&1 || true
-    IP="$(ip neigh show \
-          | awk -v m="$MAC_LOWER" 'tolower($5) == m && $1 ~ /^[0-9]/ { print $1; exit }')"
+    NEIGH="$(ip neigh show)"
+    IP="$(awk -v m="$MAC_LOWER" 'tolower($5) == m && $1 ~ /^[0-9]/ { print $1; exit }' <<<"$NEIGH")"
   fi
   [[ -n "$IP" ]] && break
   sleep 5