vboxnet0 interface does not get IP address assigned

[miskho]

Hi everyone,

I'm using Virtualbox 4.1.2 64-bit on Ubuntu 11.04 Server. I need host-only networking to be available for my virtual machines. I have configured Virtualbox to use it via File -> Preferences -> Network -> Host-only networks and it has created a virtual interface and assigned an IP to it for the first time. However, later
I was playing around with this setting and removed and added back the interface a few times (all using Virtualbox GUI). I did this because I wanted to try if I could change the interface name to something else (Now I know I can't).

After this when I had the host-only networking configured the interface was visible in my system when querying for it via "ifconfig -a" but no IP address was assigned to it. I have tried to stop the Virtualbox, uninstall it via "apt-get --purge remove virtualbox-4.1", then reboot the machine and install it again (via dpkg -i ) but I did not manage to make virtualbox assign an IP address to this interface anymore.

Do you have a clue why this is happening? I also tried to delete everything in "~/.Virualbox" after uninstalling the VB to make sure no wrong config was left on disk but it did not help.

I also tried to install VB on a different machine where it worked to observe what VB has actually configured but I could see there was no change to
/etc/network/interfaces, no /etc/vbox/interfaces file, simply I could find nothing. Do you know of a way to configure the host-only networking by hand?
Or in other words, to configure everything what VB would do if it had worked correctly?

Help is very much appreciated!
Regards,
Miso

[Sasquatch]

The interface is configured when a VM set to use Host-Only. Until such a VM is started, the interface is not configured.