Cannot attach to Linux hostifs without IP => Fixed in SVN

[Technologov]

The new networking stack of VirtualBox 2.1.0 does not detect NICs on the Linux host unless that NIC has IP address specified.

However in some cases I would not want my host NIC to have any IP at all.

For example my server has 2 NICs: 1 NIC should have IP to access the server, and second NIC is dedicated for VM networking, so it may not have an IP address at all - for security reasons.

For purposes of VBox I want my VMs to be connected to the second NIC, however it is not possible now with VBox 2.1.0, as the second NIC is not shown on the list of available host connections.

Instead I recommend list the NIcs to guest OS on a different criteria: namely whenever the interface is "UP"

This is partial output of "ifconfig" - you can see that the interface is "up" on 4th line.

tap0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:FF:DE:E1:97:1E

inet addr:192.168.168.168 Bcast:192.168.168.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::2ff:deff:fee1:971e/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:26 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:500 RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

-Technologov, 18.12.2008.

[Technologov]

update: This is partial output of "ifconfig" - you can see that the interface is "up" on 4th line.

tap0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:FF:DE:E1:97:1E

inet addr:192.168.168.168 Bcast:192.168.168.255 Mask:255.255.255.0

inet6 addr: fe80::2ff:deff:fee1:971e/64 Scope:Link

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:33 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:500

RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

[Aleksey Ilyushin]

I changed the way of network interface enumeration (SIOCGIFCONF => /proc/net/dev parsing), now all the interfaces will be picked up. Note that only the interfaces with Ethernet encapsulation will be listed.