20130430 (Tuesday, 30 April 2013)

VirtualBox machine in a LAN

I have a VirtualBox VM with a Windows XP which I use to test and maintain TIM. I installed it using an originial SP2 installation disk bought in 2005 with a machine which was always running under Debian. After installation I “activated” this copy and ran Windows Upgrade (which wasn’t completely fool-proof anymore due to the venerable age, but it worked). Let’s call it HoppelXP (because it’s the Windows XP running on Hoppel). I also had no serious problem to copy data from Armand to HoppelXP. I got TIM running there and started to use it to write down my internal work reports.

Then the problems started. I don’t know what I changed, but HoppelXP cannot see anymore neither the internet nor the other machines of our LAN.

During the first few minutes after starting the VM, issuing “net use” in a command prompt produces:

System error 1222 has occured.

The network is not present or not started.

and double-clicking the Network connections icon of the Control Panel opens an empty window with an hourglass cursor.

After some minutes of pure waiting, the window fills and

The VB user manual says:

In NAT mode, the guest network interface is assigned to the IPv4 range 10.0.x.0/24 by default where x corresponds to the instance of the NAT interface +2. So x is 2 when there is only one NAT instance active. In that case the guest is assigned to the address 10.0.2.15, the gateway is set to 10.0.2.2 and the name server can be found at 10.0.2.3.

If, for any reason, the NAT network needs to be changed, this can be achieved with the following command:

VBoxManage modifyvm “VM name” –natnet1 “192.168/16”

This command would reserve the network addresses from 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.254.254 for the first NAT network instance of “VM name”. The guest IP would be assigned to 192.168.0.15 and the default gateway could be found at 192.168.0.2.

Seems that the default, NAT mode, is what I need and always had. Is it still active? Yes, because VBoxManage showvminfo “Windows XP” –machinereadable says (among others):

natnet1="nat"

Which is the same as for a newly created VM.

Time to learn about VBoxManage.