MacOS Guest Additions - What does / doesn't work in 2018?

[VivaLaRobo]

Hello,

I am attempting to figure out what features of Guest Additions I can get working on a MacOS Host and MacOS Guest computer.

We would like to be able to query our VMs such as

Code: Select all

VBoxManage guestproperty enumerate <vmname>

but obviously we need Guest Additions installed for this. Are there any current work arounds for getting something like this working on MacOS 10.13.4?

[socratis]

Nope, not for 10.13.4, not for 10.13.x, for 10.12.x, 10.11, .10, .9, .8 or to simplify it: no GAs for OSX guests. Period.

What exactly did you want to see? Which property?

[VivaLaRobo]

Trying to view the IP address of our VMs running on the host machine. As well as other normal command line options. There's no way to do this with VirtualBox?

[socratis]

Not really... Not the way you're thinking at least, with VBoxManage. There is a script originally by user 'colmsjo', that could get the Bridged and the HostOnly IPs of an OSX guest, based on the output of 'arp -a' of the host. A big thank you to 'colmsjo', although he hasn't been seen since 2014-12-30.

The script needs a couple of adjustments. For example it would fail for VMs that had spaces in their name (e.g. "Mac OS X 10.11") and it was only looking at the 1st NIC only. I usually have 4 NICs on all of my VMs, so it would fail there as well.

I'm going to work on the script tomorrow (too late to do it now) and see if I can update it to work with up to 32 NICs that you are allowed to have in a VM.

[VivaLaRobo]

Thanks for the reply. We are interested in expanding the 2014 script as well, if you could keep this forum updated with new changes that would be awesome.

[socratis]

Most probably this weekend, I'll have something cooking. I will definitely post the updated script, that's a given...

But, expanding it? In what ways? What were you thinking more than Bridged and HostOnly options? To get the NAT, NATservice, Internal IPs?

[socratis]

It took a little bit more than a weekend, but I found some time and wrote a small script to parse all the running VMs for their ARP entries.

NOTE: The ARP table is NOT always up to date, and the script can't do anything about it.

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
#
# Translate a MAC address fetched from VirtualBox into a IP address
#

echo `(arp -a -n | wc -l | awk '{print $1}')` "entries in the ARP table to parse."

MY_MACs=();
IFS=$'\t\n';

# Loop for all the running VMs
for RunningVM in `VBoxManage list runningvms | sort | cut -d'"' -f2`; do
    echo -ne $RunningVM;

    # Loop for all 32 possible NICs
    for i in {1..32}; do
        echo -ne "."        # Just a progress indicator ;)

        # Get a string of the form: macaddressNN="080027abcdef"
        #   then cut it at the equal ("=") sign
        #     then cut it at the right length
        #       then make it all lower case
        MY_MAC=$(VBoxManage showvminfo "$RunningVM" --machinereadable | grep macaddress$i | cut -d'=' -f2 | cut -c2-13 | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]');

        # If the MY_MAC is not empty, format it so that the leading zeroes (in pairs of 2) are not shown,
        # and separate each pair number by a colon. That's because this is the way that "arp" outputs the
        # MAC addresses as well. Example: "080027ab0def" becomes "8:0:27:ab:d:ef".
        if [ "${MY_MAC}" != "" ]; then
            MY_MAC=$(echo `expr ${MY_MAC:0:2}`:`expr ${MY_MAC:2:2}`:`expr ${MY_MAC:4:2}`:`expr ${MY_MAC:6:2}`:`expr ${MY_MAC:8:2}`:`expr ${MY_MAC:10:2}`)
            MY_MACs[i]="$MY_MAC"
        fi

    # Loop for all 32 possible NICs
    done

    echo "."                # Restore order for the progress indicator

    IFS=$'\n';

    # Loop for all ARP table entries.
    for MY_ARPentry in $(arp -a -n); do
        # Each entry in the "arp -a -n" output looks like (space separated):
        #
        # ? (192.168.20.102) at (incomplete) on vboxnet0 ifscope [ethernet]
        #  1                2  3            4  5        6       7           <---- These are the spaces
        #
        # Use the space as a delimiter to get the MAC, and the parentheses to get the IP.
        MY_ARP_MAC=$(echo ${MY_ARPentry} | cut -d' ' -f4 | cut -d' ' -f3)
        MY_ARP_IP=$( echo ${MY_ARPentry} | cut -d'(' -f2 | cut -d')' -f1)
    
        # Now loop through each of the MAC addresses stored in the 'VBoxManage showvminfo'.
        # If you find a match, print it out.
        for MY_MAC in "${MY_MACs[@]}"; do
            if test "$MY_MAC" = "$MY_ARP_MAC"; then
                unset IFS
                MY_ARP_MAC="$(printf "%02X:%02X:%02X:%02X:%02X:%02X" 0x${MY_ARP_MAC//:/ 0x})"
                echo "    MAC: $MY_ARP_MAC  IP: $MY_ARP_IP"
            fi

        # Loop for all MAC addresses.
        done

    # Loop for all ARP table entries.
    done

# Loop for all the running VMs
done

The script is as simple as it gets, nothing fancy, but if you've got any ideas for improvements, just let me know...