NAT port forwarding not working - V 3.28 / Windows 7 64bit

[randolf.geist]

I've just migrated a VM from a Windows XP 32 bit host to a new Windows 7 64 bit host (via the Appliance Export / Import feature which screwed up the two VM disk images contained in the Export, but that is another story).

As part of that migration I've moved from Virtualbox 3.24 32bit to Virtualbox 3.28 64 bit on the new host.

The VM is working fine on the new host and as a last step I've tried to enable NAT port forwarding for a single TCP port as it is configured on the old host (since this obviously wasn't covered by the export, but see below that Virtualbox seems to be remove these entries from the configuration file, so may be it was even covered but removed by VirtualBox after the first invocation of the VM).

Strangely this is not working - the port doesn't get forwarded from the host to the guest and therefore the service running within the guest is not reachable from the host.

What I have observed so far:

1. On the old Windows XP host I can look at the VirtualBox host process and can clearly see that it is listening on the port configured (using ProcessExplorer Process TCP/TP tab)

2. On the new Windows 7 host this listening can not be observed via ProcessExplorer

3. I tried both methods - the old one via VBOXMANAGE SETEXTRADATA and the new one via VBOXMANAGE MODIFYVM NATPFn

In both cases I see that the corresponding entries are added to the XML configuration file when running VBOXMANAGE, but I don't spot the corresponding output in the VirtualBox logfile, in particular when using the old "SETEXTRADATA" items. I can see this extra configuration showing up in the logfile on the old host (showing up under "/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/xxx" Level 6), but I don't see it on the new host.

Once the VM is shutdown again the extra entries get removed from the XML configuration.

So all in all this looks like that these entries get ignored by the new host / Virtualbox version.

Since this is a quite old VM image a lot of old settings get used like IDE adapter and old AMD network adapter etc., for what it's worth.

Is this a known issue either on Windows 7 or Version 3.28?

Randolf

[randolf.geist]

I've found the problem: Running Virtualbox with default privileges under Windows 7 somehow prevents the port forwarding due to the default firewall settings.

Interestingly, the well known popup informing about an attempt to access something that was blocked by the firewall doesn't show up and obviously therefore Virtualbox silently ignores the port forwarding setting and consequently removes it from the XML configuration on shutdown of the VM.

When running Virtualbox explicitly with Administrator privileges the popup shows up and confirming the dialog allows Virtualbox to listen on the defined port. Everything works fine from then on (and the VM configuration is left intact regarding the port forwarding).

Very likely this is Windows 7 newbie stuff and it could probably be done via an explicit exception configuration in the Windows Firewall settings I guess. Running once with Administrator privileges solved the problem for me, from now on it works also without Admin privileges - it looks like Windows has added an exception to the firewall configuration, I'm not sure if I requested this explicitly in the popup.

Randolf

[halnovemila]

Thank you Randolf for having shared the solution you have found by yourself

[AMDAHL]

This is a useful article . Here is another side effect of Windows7 and the FIREWALL.

When setting any Network adapter mode, related to bridging the adapter from VBoX or Host adapter from VBOX it is typical that users want to get to the native host on MS7 for something . A simple ping test from your VM guest of Linux to the actual host adapter will unfortunately fail, in any mode. This is also caused by the Firewall silently dropping packets targeted to the native virtual box host only Network adapter or the native Lan adapter. In the case of bridging , you can still see the external network or other devices but not get to your MS7 system. Big Hammer, turn off the MS7 firewall for a sanity check!!!!! and see those packets fly in...