Vista Host Network Driver Kills WakeOnLan for Network Adapter

[sweetpapa]

Enabling the Virtualbox Host Interface Networking Driver disrupts the WakeOnLan feature on my network adapter. i.e. workstation will not wake up from sleep through network activity if the networking driver is enabled. This occurs when VirtualBox is not running.

If I disable it or uninstall the networking driver, WakeOnLan works again.

Workstation details: VirtualBox version: AMD64 2.1.0-41146 Host: Vista 64 SP1

[Troodon]

Same issue in 3.0.6 on Vista Home Premium. Apparently, nothing has been done about it since early 2009 whan it was first reported in the forums. The only workaround seems to be running VB without networking.

[Frank Mehnert]

The problem is indeed the host networking driver, so VirtualBox with NAT would work. No fix in sight yet. Problem described ​here.

[Troodon]

Okay, so it's a Windows Vista bug, not a VirtualBox bug. I was just wondering whether the VirtualBox passthrough networking driver is attached to a particular network adapter. If that were the case then one could conceivably try attaching it to, say, the wireless adapter while the wired adapter would remain free to respond to wake-on-lan requests. Does that make any sense?

[misha]

Replying to Troodon: The driver by default is attached to all adapters on the system the vbox could bridge with.
Dynamically attaching is not an option because it causes network connection to be temporary lost on attach/detach, however you can manually detach/reattach it by [un]checking the "VirtualBox Bridged.." service in the network connection properties dialog for any of your adapter.

[pentala]

This is still an issue with Windows 7 64 bit - will it ever be updated?

v4.2.12r84980

[DanMan32]

Still an issue for me as well. Host: Windows 7 ultimate 64bit Virtualbox 4.2.12 r84980

Doesn't matter if Virtualbox is running or not. Disabling virtualbox bridged neworking driver works around the problem. I also have VMWare bridge protocol that does not interfere with host wake-on-lan, so it should be possible to have the bridge driver and not interfere with wake-on-lan. Since Viurtualbox doesn't have to be running for the problem to occur, guest OS installed is irrelevent.

This was reported 4 years ago, why isn't this fixed yet?

As an aside, Help/About will not stay up if I change focus away from VirtualBox console, nor does it let me copy the version from About to clipboard, which makes it challenging to relay the exact version I have. I had to memorize bits and pieces of the version from About in order to write it here.

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.