How To: Make VirtualBox Use Your Router’s DHCP to get an IP Address in Linux

How To: Make VirtualBox Use Your Router’s DHCP to get an IP Address in Linux

http://r3dux.org/2009/09/how-to-make-virtualbox-use-your-routers-dhcp-to-get-an-ip-address-in-linux/

r3dux | September 5, 2009

Update: The method below for getting a virtualbox IP from your DHCP works (in linux) – but it turns out there’s an easier way (kindly pointed out byMike in the comments below). You can just change your VirtualBox network settings fromNAT to Bridged Adapter and point it at eth0/wlan0 or whichever connection is being used for networking. Then, optionally, you can configure the MAC address of the bridged adapter and set your router to assign a specific IP to a specific bridged adapter. Also, the built-in Bridged Adapter method works to deploy solutions from XNA Game Studio to my Xbox 360, so I’m rapt! Thanks, Mike!

Note: The below bit is for linux only, the above method should work on any host OS!

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VirtualBox is an awesome bit of kit and I <3 it long time ten-dorrah.

But by default when your virtual copy of Windows/Linux/Solaris/Whatever grabs an IP address, it does so throughNAT, and at version 3.0.4, this means it gives us a defaultCategory A network address (i.e. 10.x.y.z).

It’s a working cat-A address, as in it’s fully functional and can talk to the Internet and all that, but sometimes life is a lot easier if you have an IP in the same range as the DHCP pool your router is dishing out. For example, my lappy is 192.168.1.101 internally, my Wii might be 192.168.1.102, the NAS .103 etc, so I want my virtualboxen to take addresses like .104, .105 and such.

I’m doing this to bridge my wireless connection on wlan0, if you’re bridging an ethernet connection substitute eth0 or whatever connection as necessary.

Also, to perform the bridging using this method, you’ll need some tools (feel free tosudo apt-get install NAME-OF-TOOL as necessary):
- 1.) uml-utilities
- 2.) parprouted
- 3.) bcrelay

Now, with that lot installed, run the following commands (provided here in bash script form):

#!/bin/bash
 
# To use this script you will need the following utilities installed:
# 1.) uml-utilities 2.) parprouted  3.) bcrelay
# sudo apt-get install 'em
 
# Enable IP forwarding
sudo sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
 
# Create a TAP as your current logged in user (replace with -u YOUR-USER-NAME if you want...)
sudo tunctl -u $USER
 
# Tell tap0 to respond to ARP (Address Resolution Protocal) packets 
sudo sysctl net.ipv4.conf.tap0.proxy_arp=1
 
# Give your TAP (tap0) an IP address and enable it (make sure the IP address is OUTSIDE the DHCP range on your router)
sudo ip addr add 192.168.1.150/32 dev tap0
sudo ip link set tap0 up
 
# Run parprouted and make it add routes automatically for wlan0 and tap0 as needed
# Make the command "parprouted -d wlan0 tap0" to display routes added and additional info. No sudo necc. for this one.
parprouted wlan0 tap0
 
# Use bcrelay on your net connection and TAP to "rewrite the layer-2 header and forward broadcast messages between network interfaces"
# The "-d" in this instance MAKES bcrelay work as a daemon. Need to sudo this or it doesn't work.
sudo bcrelay -d -i tap0 -o wlan0

Now, fire up VirtualBox and for your machine of choice change the network selection from NAT to tap0 as shown:

Then boot up your virtual machine and check the IP:

Great. Super. Smashing. =D

Note: The entire reason I wanted to grab an IP from the router was so my virtual copy of XP could be on the same network as my XBox 360, so I could deploy games to it throughXNA Studio 3.1, however XNA Studio is very fussy about timing when it comes to registering the 360, and although it can see the 360 using the bridge, and it tries to connect, it times out before it can fully establish a connection. I guess I’ll have to go with an IP routes method of bridging if I want it to work for that purpose, but as yet I haven’t quite figured it all out. Will keep trying when I have time, or if you know a way, feel free to call me technically incompetent and sling a solution in the comments! Cheers!

文件共享是Virtualbox 虚拟机和宿主机之间通信的工具。

从虚拟机中或许不能ping宿主机（win7）

在防火墙中 添加自定义策略：
a. 在控制面板中打开“Windows Firewall” （Control Panel All Control Panel ItemsWindows Firewall）， 选择“Advanced Settings”
b. 右击“Inbound Rules”，选择“New Rule”，选“Custom”，下一步，选“All Programs”， 下一步，Protocol选择“ICMPv4”，下一步，设置本地和远端受限IP（根据情况设置，我这里设置 remote IP address 为IP段： 选 These IP Address，然后点Add添加Guest虚拟机所在的IP段）， 下一步，默认， 下一步，默认，最后，输入防火墙规则名称和注释。
c. OK

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/virtualbox-network-sharing.html

This links explains the network sharing and folder sharing.

Adapter Type defines the virtualized hardware that VirtualBox will expose to your virtual machine.

Network Address Translation (NAT)

NAT means the virtual machines will have private IP addresses that are not routable from outside.

Your host is 192.168.1.1. The VirtualBox NAT device will be marked as 10.0.2.1.

Bridged Adapter:

Bridged Adapter means that any virtual machine running will try to obtain an IP address from the same source your currently active, default network address got its IP address. Hence the term bridged, as the two are connected.

Example: Your host has leased an address of 192.168.1.100 from the router. The virtual machine leases an address of 192.168.1.103 from the router. The two machines now share the same network and all standard rules apply. For all practical purposes, the virtual machine is another IP address on your LAN.

Host-only Adapter

Host-only Adapter is very interesting. It's very similar to Bridged Adapter, except that is uses a dedicated network device, called vboxnet0(linux) or Virtual Box Host Only Ethernet adapter, to lease IP addresses. 

Your host machine is the de-facto VirtualBox router, with the IP address of 192.168.56.1. The adapter is not in use if there are no virtual machines running with Host-only setup. However, once they come up, this adapter serves IP addresses to the virtual machines, creating an internal LAN, within your own network.

Example: Your host has the IP address of 192.168.56.1. Your virtual machine has the IP address of 192.168.56.101.

mask: 255.255.255.0

Sharing via network

Earlier, we mentioned that sharing via network is only possible for Bridged and Host-only network. Let's see two examples. The first step is to allow sharing in the guest machine.

Then, you access the virtual machine via its IP address.

On Windows:

On Windows, use Start > Run > \\XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX and replace the triplets of Xs with the actual IP of the virtual machine.

On Linux:

Type smb://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX in the address bar of the file manager. smb:// stands for the Samba network protocol. The triplets of Xs stand for the IP address of our guest machine.

With Bridged networking, it looks like this:

With Host-only, it looks like this:

Ignore the title Windows shares. Samba is usually used to share with Windows hosts. NFS is more typically used for Linux machines. Samba is preferred, because it works with both. For more about Samba sharing, please take a look at this tutorial.

Shared Folders

P.S. All of the above is identical for Windows and Linux guests, by the way. To this end, I decided to take the last set of screenshots demonstrating Shared Folders on a Windows machine.

Now, Shared Folders are quite simple to setup. Your first step is to configure a folder on your host that you wish to share. For any virtual machine, open the Settings menu and go to Shared Folders.

In the right pane, you will have a list of all shared folders on the machine. You can add and remove them as you see fit. The little icons to the right are used for that purpose.

Folder Path:

This is the actual, physical path that you wish to share. On Windows, the folder path will be something like C:\shared. On Linux, it will look something like /home/roger/shared.

Folder Name:

This is the name of the share that your guests will see. Please use names without spaces, something like Shared-folder or Banana. This name can be identical to the actual folder you're sharing, but it does not have to be. But please note, this is not a path! It's a symbolic name for virtual machines to use, as they do not see your physical hardware.

Once you've created the path, boot you virtual machine.

On Windows:

If your virtual machine is a Windows host, you can access the network share either via the command line or using the Tools > Map Network Drive option in the Explorer menu.

On the command line, you need to use the net use command.

net use <drive letter> \\vboxsvr\share-name

net use is the command for mounting network drives.

<drive letter> is the drive that will be assigned the share inside your virtual machine. It can be any free letter, like E:, G:, X:, etc.

\\vboxsvr\share-name is the path to the share. \\vboxsvr is the VirtualBox sharing server. share-name is the actual folder name from earlier. So if you called your share Rambo, then the path reads \\vboxsvr\Rambo.

The command then looks like:

net use h: \\vboxsvr\Rambo

Via the Tools menu in the Explorer, it looks like this:

You can check Reconnect at logon, so you don't have to repeat this task every time you power on the virtual machine. Once you click Finish, you will have a new drive under your My Computer. Opening this new drive letter will take you into the Shared folder.

On Linux:

This is done by a simple command in a terminal windows:

mount -t vboxsf share mount_point

vboxsf is the pseudo-filesystem type used to mount the Shared Folder. It's an abstract translation layer for the virtual sharing service used by VirtualBox.

share is the name of the folder from earlier. Remember, the name and not the path! For example, if our share is called Banana then share = Banana.

mount_point is any directory in your Linux tree where you wish to mount the Shared folder to. For example, /home/roger/shares-go-here.

Thus, our command looks like:

mount -t vboxsf Banana /home/roger/shares-go-here

And then, everything that is inside the shared folder on your host will be visible inside the virtual machine by going to the above path.

To automate the task, you can add the mount option to the /etc/fstab menu. Again, for more details on how to do this, please refer to my Linux commands tutorial.

BTW, notice the help in the Settings menu, explaining how to achieve this!