Getting VBox (Win10) to get Bridged WiFi access in the VM

[ayarrington73]

Hey everybody, I haven't been on here in a few years so I had to create a new account and all. In any case, I just installed a freshly d/l'd virtualbox on my newish laptop running Win10(fully updated). I have a d/l'd iso of linux mint I want to run in a vm, but I'm having trouble getting the vm bridge to the wireless adapter working. Can someone please help with this? Thanks in advance!

[ayarrington73]

Incidently, I did get this error when trying to create a bridge to the host, I think it was called:
Failed to create a host network interface.

Querying NetCfgInstanceId failed (0x00000002).

Result Code: E_FAIL (0x80004005)
Component: HostNetworkInterfaceWrap
Interface: IHostNetworkInterface {455f8c45-44a0-a470-ba20-27890b96dba9}

[socratis]

Re-install VirtualBox. If you have any 3rd party antivirus, disable them (or even better uninstall them completely) before installing VirtualBox, as some of them are preventing the networking filter from getting installed.

BTW, can you Bridge to other network adapters? And why Bridged necessarily, you could always use the default NAT.

[EgonF]

I've the same problem. My laptop has two network adapters: wifi and ethernet. There are two linux (mint) virtual machines. There should be connections between the vm and with the host. Therefore NAT is not sufficient - a bridge is needed.

If the laptop is connected to the ethernet every vm can connect to the internet and to the local net.

But if I remove the ethernet cable the connections are lost. The question is how to configure virtualbox to use (everytime ?) wifi and not ethernet.

[socratis]

Bridged over wireless don't always play nice. Bridged networking is outside the WLAN specification. It may or may not work. Some combinations of Routers/Access Points, WLAN cards and drivers work, some don't. See: Bridging & Wifi - Supported hardware and add your experience. For example, it works fine in my home, but not in my office. Same laptop, same VM.

[EgonF]

@socratis:

Can you please tell us what virtualbox network configuration do you have at home?

[socratis]

I gave you a link to read. You apparently didn't...
And how's that going to help you? Are you going to get my WiFi router?

[EgonF]

I gave you a link to read. You apparently didn't...

I did and I wrote which informations are wanted.

And how's that going to help you? Are you going to get my WiFi router?

Did I say I want your router? No. I wanted to know how you have your network in virtualbox vm configured.

Bridged networking is outside the WLAN specification.

I assume the problem is Virtualbox has to connect the correct adapters - the real one in the host (and there it should be the wifi adapter) with the virtual one in the vm.

[socratis]

I assume the problem is Virtualbox has to connect the correct adapters - the real one in the host (and there it should be the wifi adapter) with the virtual one in the vm.

No, it's not. It's not VirtualBox or any configuration that you "change" or you "correct".

If you read the link again, you'll understand that it's NOT a matter of configuration. There's nothing to configure. It's a matter of hardware/software between your WiFi router and your network card. It's not VirtualBox dependent. So, if you want that to work, you'll have to get my router and my WiFi card. Because with the router in my office it doesn't work. I was hoping that that reference alone would have been enough...

And here's a more technical explanation, pay special attention to the last paragraph:

Many wifi routers now try to use unicast link-level destination for broadcast/multicast IP destination. The reasons are explained in http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vyncke ... ficient-01 - that is in context of IPv6, but the same logic applies to IPv4 (IPv6 is hit harder since it relies more on multicast). Behavior varies between wifi routers, so you may get bridged setup working with some and not working with others.

If the wifi router that is not working for you just uses unicast delivery for multicast, then 4.3.16 should help (a typical packet capture can be seen in #12207). In this case the host was receiving DHCP replies intended for the guest (broadcast IP, but unicast to host MAC), but was not rewriting MAC address correctly, so the guest was not receiving the packet. If you plug another computer into the wired port of the router to capture DHCP exchange as seen on the wired side, you would see the same DHCP replies sent to ethernet broadcast on the wired connection. So this is just an optimization for wifi that some routers do.

Unfortunately - and this is orthogonal to multicast/unicast issue above - some routers will send DHCP replies to broadcast IP, but to the unicast client MAC address (i.e. guest MAC in this case) fetched from the DHCP request. These packets will never be even seen by the host. I'm afraid the packet captures in comment:14 is an example of that. In the ethernet capture you can see DHCP replies unicast to guest and in the wireless capture you don't see any replies at all. I have one router like this (though it at least uses ethernet broadcast for its DHCP NAKs, so you can see something in the wireless capture .

This latter kind of routers has problems with DHCP, but usually you can work around it by not using DHCP and using static IP instead. E.g. I cannot connect to that router of mine with DHCP, but if I use static IP in the guest then I get normal connectivity. Yes, this is suboptimal , but better than no connectivity if you must use bridged for some reason.

[EgonF]

Thank you

EgonF