XP on Feisty - Can't contact domain on bridge net

sweetnavelorange · Post by **sweetnavelorange** » 12. Nov 2007, 01:25

Greetings, I'd appreciate any ideas people may have....
I have Windows XP on VirtualBox 1.5.2, using static bridged networking. This seems to work fine, I can ping/browse shares etc. on our work LAN, and can in turn ping the guest from the host - until my 3-monthly password expiry comes up.
First, I don't receive the "Your password is about to expire" notification on this box, only on another (real) XP box. Second, I can successfully change the password from my VM, but once I do I'm immediately locked out from logging in again on it (although my physical box happily uses the new password). I can continue to use my VM for a while by reverting to a snapshot and using the old credentials, but eventually (after an hour or two) I get locked out. Third, I have previously dealt with this by getting one of our techs to re-join me to the domain (something I lack the privilege to do) - but this only works for three months, and they're starting to get suspicious of my using "unsupported" software - they've threatened to make me use VMware. So I'd rather find the root of the problem myself, but I lack the net-foo to do this.... does anyone have any hints? I've tried comparing the networking setups on the VM and my physical XP box, but everything seems the same...
Please tell me if you need more info, cheers.

Post by **Ingo** » 15. Nov 2007, 22:07

It seems your bridge isn't completely transparent, maybe for special netbios communication on ports 137,138 and 139. Do you have investigated in that direction?
There are also some kernel filters for the bridge in:
/proc/sys/net/bridge/

sweetnavelorange · Post by **sweetnavelorange** » 16. Nov 2007, 00:45

Thanks for the tips....

Regarding /proc/sys/net/bridge/, I just tried setting all bridge-nf-* to 0 just in case; but no change (I wouldn't expect any, as I don't have any iptables rules etc. defined).

Regarding bridge transparency, this is getting into areas I know very little about... how can I find out more about this? I know samba on the host binds to 137 and 138, but I assume this has nothing to do with the guest (certainly disabling samba didn't help me). The guest responds to nbtscan NetBIOS queries similarly to my physical XP box, if that helps.

Thanks again.

Post by **Ingo** » 16. Nov 2007, 15:08

This Microsoft registration stuff is a little bit sophisticated. But your problems point all in the same direction. Neither the client nor a user can authenticate to the MS domain. The older MS operating systems (e.g. NT, win2k) use netbios for this, the newer one (XP, Vista?) do not need netbios but can use it for compatibility. And that all makes it difficult to figure out what's going wrong. But I think you have to look for the authentication to the domain (NT domain?, AD?). For me, I would now look with tcpdump on the different interfaces to get an idea what's going on.