[Solved] Guest OS doesn’t connect with Host Network connection

[ecomguy]

I installed VirtualBox 4.0.0 on Windows XP, then I added the Virtual Appliance from virtualboximages.com for PCLinuxOS KDE 2010.10.  The guest OS boots up pretty well, and most apps appear to be working normally, except that the guest can't access the Internet with its network connection, which I have left on the default NAT setting. (The host OS network connection is functioning normally.)

Here are some things that I have noticed:
-- When trying to open a Web page in a browser I get a server not found error.
-- On the KDE Desktop when I open Network Center it lists the Wired (Ethernet) connection as eth1, but when I click the Monitor button Network Monitor shows eth0 as the default connection.
-- Within Network Monitoring when I click the Connect Ethernet button I get this error message: “Connection failed.  Verify your connection in Mandriva Linux Control Center.”  When I go to the PCLinuxOS Control Center it again shows that eth1 is the network connection.

Do I just need to change the default connection from eth0 to eth1 somewhere in the guest OS settings, or are other changes needed?

[kjpetrie]

Welcome to the forum. I'm glad you're experimenting with pclos, albeit in a virtual machine.

People here are friendly and helpful, but there are a couple of unusual things about your set up which might limit the numbers able to offer help: you are running the Windows version of VB and also you are running v4 which is new and likely to be buggy, and not used on pclos yet, so people will not be familiar with it.

With those two caveats out of the way, can you make sure there is only one virtual NIC attached to the VM? The fact that some parts of the system are seeing an eth0 and others an eth1 suggests the system sees two virtual cards. This could be an artefact of the way VB4 works, of course, and I wouldn't know about that as I'm using 3.2.12.

It's not yet clear whether the problem is in your pclos installation (here is the right place for help) or your Windows VB installation (help from VB forum), so please be patient with us as we try to find out more. Full details of your virtual machine might also help.

[ecomguy]

Thanks for the prompt response.  I'm new to both virtualization and Linux, so your patience is appreciated.

First of all, VB 4 crashed while I was checking settings, so that confirmed your comment that VB 4 might not be stable.  I did some searching and found that the version you are using, VB 3.2.12, seems to be the latest stable version.  So I uninstalled VB 4, then installed 3.2.12.  Then I installed the PCLOS KDE 2010.12 appliance again (since PCLOS was not offered as a choice when installing the VM I chose "other Linux" as the type of Linux).

I then checked the network connections in the same way that I said in my original post, and found exactly the same results (no Web sites found in browsers, eth1 shown as the connection in some places, eth0 in others, etc.).

Attempting to answer your question re: only one NIC attached to the VM I navigated within VB 3.2.12 to Settings > Network and found that only one of the adapters was set up.  Does this answer your question, or should I be looking at something else?  If something else, please indicate the navigation path.

I'm not sure what details about the virtual machine you are seeking.  It's the PCLOS KDE 2010.12 Virtual Appliance located at this link:
 http://virtualboximages.com/PCLinuxOS+KDE+2010.12+VirtualBox+Virtual+Appliance.  If you need other details, let me know.

Thanks.

[ecomguy]

I've made some progress since my previous post.  I spotted a post on the VB Web site where a user noted recently that there is a bug in both VB 4 and VB 3.2 where if the host OS has its only DNS server as 127.0.0.1, then the guest's NAT DNS will be empty.  He said that he could only make the guest server work by specifying the DNS server manually.

Even though I did not see 127.0.0.1 being used on my system that gave me the idea to try setting the the connection manually.  To do this I went within PCLOS desktop to Network Center > Configure, then chose manual configuration.  There I entered the IP addresses that I had found by using the Windows command line interface (Start > Run > cmd > ipconfig/all).  This seemed to connect the monitor within PCLOS Network Center, so that the monitor started showing some activity, however the browser was still not able to find a Web page.

Then I closed the VM and opened it again, went to PCLOS Network Center again, and chose Automatic IP (BOOT/DHCP) instead of manual configuration.  This made the full connection to the Internet so that I can now bring up Web pages within the browser.  I then closed the VM and VB and restarted them to make sure that they could still connection through to the Internet. They do.

I can't tell you exactly why these changes worked, but I'm now connected.