Bridged networking broken in Virtualbox 3.1.2 for Windows 2008 R2 host

[wabe]

After upgrading VB to 3.1.2 on a Windows 2008 R2 host bridged networking doesn't work. Same problem on two VMs one running OpenSuse x64 and one running Windows 7 x64. Both VMs can access internal network on 192.168.3.X but none of them have internet access. Changing network type to "NAT" restores internet access Downgrading to 3.1.0 hasn't helped. No change on system except upgrading to 3.1.2

[misha]

What third-party networking-related software (like VPN, Antivirus, Firewall or virtualization software) do you have installed on your host?

[Adam Walker]

Is your host adapter still showing up in the drop-down box?

Having upgraded from 3.1.0, I have also lost the ability to use bridged networking (though I'm using XP). No host adapters are available to select in the "Name:" drop-down box (when "Bridged Adapter" is specified), and it's because the "VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver" (i.e. VBoxNetFlt) is not present in the Windows adapter properties window. Upon manually installing the driver (as a 'service'), the adapter becomes available to select in VirtualBox, but upon starting the machine, a VERR_SUPDRV_COMPONENT_NOT_FOUND error is generated.

In device manager, the "VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver Miniport" is not present with 3.1.2 installed, yet it is with 3.1.0. When I reverted to version 3.1.0, I could see the driver in question being installed as part of the installation process. This does NOT happen when installing 3.1.2.

[wabe]

Is your host adapter still showing up in the drop-down box?

Yes it does.

FYI: I also upgraded an XP-machine with 3.1.2 and it broke the connection there too. Donwlgrading to 3.1.0 restored internet connection if setting network to "NAT" for a Win 7 VM but network connection for a Suse Linux VM is completely non-functional.

[misha]

Replying to walkeral: Please attach ​msi & setupapi logs for your VBox installation here.
Note: before installing it is better to remove or backup somewhere setupapi log files (i.e. setupapi.log, setupapi.app.log and setupapi.dev.log) to ensure the install produces a fresh logs w/o any info about previous installs.

[misha]

Replying to wabe: please specify the list of third-party networking software you have installed on the host as per comment 1

[misha]

Replying to wabe:

.. Both VMs can access internal network on 192.168.3.X

Does ping on external network work? Also can you try whether accessing some external host by IP (rather than by name) works?

[ferdinaaron]

I can confirm that the ShrewSoft VPN driver is one cause of this issue on a Windows 7 x64 host with a Ubuntu 9.10 x86 guest. With the VPN driver enabled, Bridged networking (Especially DNS resolution) was questionable while local and NAT worked fine. nslookups failed and DNS would not resolve. I could PING the local bridged subnet without issue and was able to SSH to another machine. Very strange behavior. I simply disabled the checkbox for the VPN driver on the hosts NIC and all started working again.

[wabe]

<Does ping on external network work? Also can you try whether accessing some external host by IP (rather than by name) works?

No - doesn't work.

<What third-party networking-related software (like VPN, Antivirus, Firewall or virtualization software) do you have installed on your host? Shrewsoft VPN Symantec Enterprise Security (only anti-virus component)

<I can confirm that the ShrewSoft? VPN driver is one cause of this issue on a Windows 7 x64 host with a Ubuntu 9.10 x86 guest.

I have the same issue on a different machine running XP as host OS. Same antivirus solution as mentioned above but no Shrewsoft VPN installed

[Michael Baas]

showvminfo for vbox [MBaas]

[Michael Baas]

Replying to wabe:

Hi, I'd like to add myself to this ticket following a recommendation from PerryG in the forum (​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=27286&p=121790#p121790)

See my 2 attachments for showvminfo and log.

[Michael Baas]

setupapi.txt

[Nick Heppleston]

I managed to get around this by running the VBox Admin Console as Administrator on my Windows 7 host and then starting the guest. I don't know if this works for anyone else?

[Michael Baas]

nickh, I'm admin on the W2003-server, doesn't impress VB too much :(

[Michael Baas]

Replying to mbaas:

Ok, finally the 3.1.4-update has fixed the probs and my VM is perfectly integrated in the LAN. I'm in (virtual) heaven now! :)

[wabe]

I upgraded to 3.1.4 and still same problems. I found a solution. Disabling a service restores bridged networking. The service is Shrewsoft DNS Proxy Daemon (part of Shrewsoft Ipsec client). Stopping this service solves the problem. Hope Virtualbox can work with Shrewsoft to find a solution.

[misha]

The Shrewsoft issue described here is a duplicate of #3752. See the latter for detail.

[Konstantin Vlasov]

I have the same problem with bridged network here. My adapters are present in the VM settings dialog in the list of adapters available for bridging. However if I bridge a guest machine, it can connect to the host machine only and not anywhere outside. Nothing works: neither ping, nor Samba, nor HTTP, nor SSH; I tested everything by IP only, because even DNS in my local network cannot be accessed.

Host OS: XP x64 SP2
Guest OSes tested: XP x86 SP3, openSUSE 11.2, Ubuntu 9.10.

List of network-related software on my host machine:

• Jetico Personal Firewall 2.1.0.7
  
• Kaspersky Antivirus 2010 (9.0.0.736)
  

Of course, I tried disabling both, it did not help.

My network connection is direct, without any VPN.

I created the installation logs requested by misha, and will attach them now.

[Konstantin Vlasov]

MSI installation log (VB 3.2.2)

[Konstantin Vlasov]

Driver installation log (VB 3.2.2)

[Konstantin Vlasov]

VB 3.2.10 is out, and the bug is still there... :( Can we provide any help?

[Mathias Eggers]

I had the dns problem, too. I use Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit as on VirtualBox 3.2.10 and several Debian based clients: Debian squeeze / Ubuntu 10.04 / 10.10 all 64bit. But my clients had all the time ip connectivity to the internet. Pinging several hosts by ip address worked always.

In avira knowledgebase i found the solution for my problem: my firewall (avira premium security suite) provides a preconfigured rule to allow VMWARE-connections and after activating it for the lan interface where the bridge resides dns resolution is working again. But the Avira guys do not describe what exactly they allow there, even the details of the rule are hidden :-(. Is anybody out there able to provide this information, so everybody could try solving their problem with a similar rule?

[Konstantin Vlasov]

Replying to mathias:
Cannot tell for everyone, but I tried even complete firewall disabling (with absolutely all network activities allowed, both on host and guest) and it did not help.

[Konstantin Vlasov]

Version 4.0.0: the problem still persists.

I have found a dedicated computer, installed a fresh WinXP SP3 onto it from an original MSDN disk, turned the built-in firewall off, installed VirtualBox and created a new virtual machine with bridged network adapter and installed the same WinXP SP3 into it. Then I configured the network IP addresses, turned the guest XP firewall off and tested connectivity: the virtual machine can see the host computer by any IP address it has, but refuses to go outside, into the external network. No third-party software was installed, so there is nothing VB could be interfered by.

The problem is 100% reproducable. What else do we need to do? How can we help to improve the situation? Just tell us. It's becoming plain ridiculous: second major release is out, and one of the top-level functionalities just does not work at all!

[misha]

Replying to CaptainFlint: I'm unable to reproduce the problem here. Could you specify some more detail on your network configuration, i.e. what host NIC you use for bridged networking; what IP configuration does your host & guest have, is it obtained via DHCP or configured statically, how does your host gets connected to other computers on the network, etc. Please also attach a session log for your VM.

[Konstantin Vlasov]

Replying to misha:
My usual configuration is as follows:

• host machine has a Loopback adapter with static IP 192.168.10.1;
  
• main host NIC has Internet Connection Sharing turned on allowing outside connections for this Loopback;
  
• the VM is bridged to the Loopback, is configured as static IP address from 192.168.10.0/24 network, with 192.168.10.1 as primary gateway.

I use this scheme for the following reasons:
a) need to access the outside world from VMs (internal and host-only network do not fit);
b) lack of free IP addresses in our corporate network (direct bridged connection needs them);
b) I do not wish my VMs to be visible from outside;
c) I wish to connect from my host machine into VM easily (NAT does not fit).

However, once I tried bridging to a real network adapter (admins gave me an additional IP temporarily for the experiment), but it did not show any different results, so I returned to the scheme described above.

Host NICs varied a lot: PCI card from Realtek, internal adapters in several ASUS and one EPOX motherboards — if necessary I can find their exact models, but I don't think it makes any difference. The host network configuration is direct connection (no VPN), I tried both DHCP and static configuration — it did not affect the bug described.

The only machine I could not reproduce this problem was my notebook with Windows Vista installed, but as usual for notebooks, there is huge amount of third-party drivers and software, so it can hardly be considered a valuable result. Other computers I tried were all running WinXP 32-bit or WinXP 64-bit, and all they had this problem. I still have plans to install a fresh Vista or Win7 on some computer and check with them (though wabe reported this bug as for Windows 2008 R2, so the problem should not be XP specific).

[Konstantin Vlasov]

Guest machine log

[misha]

Replying to CaptainFlint: Well, your config is a bit sophisticated I would say. I'll try to check why your current config does not work, but there is a much easier way to achieve what you want. Your VM could just have two NICs one configured as NAT and another as Host-Only.

Not sure why bridging with the "real" host adapter does not work for you, first I would suggest you test it with "connection sharing" turned off if you have not already. Just tested it on a fresh install of WinXP SP2 as well as Vista64, and it worked ok for me there.
Generally it seems to work for most users as well. As for wabe and some others reporting the issue here, there issue is actually caused by a ShrewSoft firewall, see #3752

[Konstantin Vlasov]

Replying to misha:

Well, your config is a bit sophisticated I would say. I'll try to check why your current config does not work, but there is a much easier way to achieve what you want. Your VM could just have two NICs one configured as NAT and another as Host-Only.

This configuration is very inconvenient to me. I work with VMs actively and create/remove them very often. So each additional click in the setup becomes a pain in the neck. With the configuration I described I just need to select the Bridged mode and then specify the Loopback adapter, — and voila, network is configured. With your variant I have to configure an additional network card and select modes for them both. Besides, it's simpler to work when only one IP is used in the guest OS for everything: if something goes wrong, there are less items to check.

Besides, my configuration is not sophisticated at all. Actually it's the same host-only networking, just allowed outside via ICS, nothing more. It's exactly as if you plugged another computer via cross-over cable and shared its connection so that it could access Internet via your computer. Moreover, since this bug appeared in VirtualBox (in version 3.0.0 or 3.1.0, I don't remember exactly), I'm using the Host-only adapter as a replacement for the Loopback. If I share the main host adapter for VB Host-Only instead of Loopback, then access outside works absolutely flawlessly. The only drawback is that VB's DHCP does not assign default gateway, but I always customize static addresses, so this problem does not affect me.

Not sure why bridging with the "real" host adapter does not work for you, first I would suggest you test it with "connection sharing" turned off if you have not already.

When I was testing it the sharing was turned off.

Just tested it on a fresh install of WinXP SP2 as well as Vista64, and it worked ok for me there.

Is there any way I could track where exactly the network packets stick? When I get time I'll try installing Wireshark on the host and guest and look what happens, but I suspect the problem is somewhere in between the host and guest. Maybe, in the VB Miniport driver. (BTW, the Host-Only adapter does not have the Bridge Driver, it's turned off there — and access works fine. Might it be that it's exactly the reason why it works and normal Loopback does not?)

Generally it seems to work for most users as well. As for wabe and some others reporting the issue here, there issue is actually caused by a ShrewSoft firewall, see #3752

Ah, sorry, I did not read the whole thread attentively enough.

[Konstantin Vlasov]

I performed some more experiments and have to admit that, indeed, direct bridged networking works fine. Probably it has been fixed in the meantime — I checked it only when I first met this problem (sometime around the releases of 3.0.x or 3.1.x), and after that I tested only with my loopback-configuration.

Also, I tested it in Windows 7, and the problem cannot be reproduced there. So, to summarize, the problem is reproducable only in pre-7 or pre-Vista systems and with bridged Loopback which is allowed outside via Internet Connection Sharing. Maybe, I should open a new ticket for this problem? It seems unrelated to the current one now…

2 misha:
You wanted to experiment with my kind of configuration, did you do it yet?

[misha]

Replying to CaptainFlint:

2 misha:
You wanted to experiment with my kind of configuration, did you do it yet?

Sorry for delay, was on vacation until today. Will try it out these days.

[misha]

Replying to CaptainFlint: Reproduced the problem here, and I guess I know the right way of solving it. Will have a look..

[Konstantin Vlasov]

Replying to misha:
Thanks for you effort! That would be great.

[Konstantin Vlasov]

Replying to misha:
Any news on this problem?