Win 10 Guest Loses Network

[fth0]

No, 2023-09-13T12:13:04Z (UTC) should be 08:13AM EST (AM, not PM).

In general, I'm not sure if I understand completely what you did, what happened and what you noticed on 2023-09-12 and 2023-09-13, especially at which time. If you can reproduce the issue without using a static IP address, I'd suggest the following test:

Configure the guest OS to use DHCP and shut it down. Start taking notes of possibly relevant events with your local time added during the following: Start the VM, reproduce the issue and shut down the VM from within the guest OS. Provide a zip file with the contents of the VirtualBox global configuration folder (contains the DHCP related information amongst others) and another one with the VBox.log file and your notes. I need this double time keeping to see if your (perceived) times and VirtualBox's (measured) times match, because both could potentially be flawed (no mistrust intended ).

[rbane]

Sure I can configure it to use a DHCP reservation instead of static and I'll track the times. I did find another wrinkle with this today. If I do a speed test on the problem VM the download speed is extremely low. If I run a speed test on the host or on one of the Linux VMs attached to the same host they are as expected. Attached the results from all 3.

[rbane]

I'm also finding that if I generate traffic by doing speed tests I can duplicate the issue within a few minutes. Attached is the data you requested along with notes for what I did and when. Thanks!

[fth0]

Thanks for the tests and for optimizing the reproducibility!

Neither the global VBoxSVC.log files nor the VM-specific VBox.log file show any signs of networking issues, even the statistics of the virtual network controller are looking clean. In consequence, you'll have to investigate on the host and in the guest OS. Some ideas:

1. Does the issue occur if you reboot the host and only run the Windows VM afterwards?

2. Is the Windows guest OS activated (I've heard about network issues in non-activated Windows versions in the past, especially in test builds)?

3. You could search for issues in the Windows Event Viewer (in the guest OS).

4. You could use Wireshark in the guest OS to capture all network traffic. I could help in analyzing the results.

[rbane]

Thanks I appreciate the help! The guest is activated and I've checked out the system log and network related logs on the guest but am not finding any clues. I'll try suggestions 1 and 4.

[rbane]

I completely removed the Linux guests from the host, shutdown the guest Windows VM, quit VirtualBox and relaunched the Windows Vm but the problem persists.

[fth0]

Just to be clear, the main point of suggestion 1 was the host reboot, which you didn't mention.

[rbane]

Yep sorry host was rebooted too, I was just trying to isolate things more as well as getting those other VMs off the host so if needed I can try other things without affecting them.

[rbane]

For giggles I unchecked "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" in device manager on the guest VM. So far it hasn't locked up. Fingers crossed!

[fth0]

I unchecked "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" in device manager on the guest VM.

Interesting idea! How do you manage to set up a Windows guest that doesn't implicitly use the Internet all the time?

FWIW, that was rather a rhetorical question: I have a test VMs with a default Windows 10 installation that I run from time to time for the necessary Windows updates, and when the network icon in the VM's status bar shows near to no activity for more than 120 seconds, I shut down the VM, because I never saw it being totally inactive for much more than 60 seconds. Perhaps the Windows news aggregator and similar components keep the network "always on".

[rbane]

Failed again today. I noticed that if I disable/enable the adapter in the guest VM network connectivity comes back.

[rbane]

Just an update in that I have switched the guest VM to use the paravirtualized network adapter and it seems to have made a big difference in the speed tests. Fingers crossed again that things do not lock up!

[rbane]

It's been 5 days on the paravirtualized network adapter without issue. Hoping I'm good moving forward. I appreciate the help with the logs and possible solutions.

[fth0]

Thanks for reporting back, appreciated, too!