virtualbox.org

I'm a bit disappointed that I could not find "on the net" ANY reference to the fact that 6.1.16 appeared to break bridged networks in Windows 10 / VirtualBox. (A post from Oracle/VirtualBox would have been nice ) I spent a several hours trying suggestions that were pre-6.1.16, to no avail. Today I see 6.1.18 has been released and "Viola!" the bridged networked problems that I had been having have gone away.

I hope this helps someone.

Cheers, Geoff

These are user to user discussion forums. Problems will only be discussed if users have encountered them. I have no idea what the Oracle devs knew: they are under no obligation to keep users of the free version notified about any support issues. I see nothing in the changelog that I find obviously relevant to the bridged networking function.

Do you have any references for this problem, or is it just supposition? I don't recall it cropping on these forums, which I would expect if the problem was real. My regularly used Win10 VM uses bridged networking, as do some less used VMs, and I never saw any such problem in 6.1.16. Windows Updates etc all continued normally. I don't do a lot of Internet browsing from VMs, but access to the Synology NAS on my LAN had no apparant problems.

Thanks for your reply, mpack.

I have several VMs that use (the same) bridged networking. I recently (in the last week or so) upgraded to 6.1.16 after not having used VB for some months. In the VM manager, all my VMs produced an error that bridged networking was not available. I assumed (didn't confirm) that 6.1.16 was a 'recent' update. When 6.1.18 seemed to come out so quickly after 6.1.16 I thought that it was to fix a "break" in the release, but couldn't find any evidence that that was the case.

6.1.16 was the *first* time I have ever had problems with bridged networking and have been using it for a long while now - seems like since rev 5 days. I have, however, only used Windows hosts. My update process has not changed; I did the "obligatory" reboots, etc, but 6.1.16 would not recognize my bridged networks. After updating to 6.1.18, those same VMs worked again without any extra tweaking.

I posted to see if any extra info would tumble out of the woodwork since I couldn't find any other documentation of why my 6.1.16 update failed, and was "corrected" by 6.1.18.

I appreciate that Oracle devs are under no obligation to post, but sometimes, vendor devs do.

?? Updates come out every one or two months, on average. 6.1.16 came out Oct 16 2020. 6.1.18 came out January 19th 2021, so it definitely was NOT a quick fix release. If anything the release gap was unusually long, though being the vacation period probably has a bearing there.

By the same token users had three months to mention that bridged networking had stopped working for them - and I'm not aware of any such discussion. You said yourself that you did not find any either.

I can't really speculate about the cause of failure since you haven't given a lot of detail about the symptoms - all you say is "problems". Possibilities are that you failed to install the bridged networking driver, in which case any full reinstall of VirtualBox would fix it. Or, that the network cards being bridged to have changed names (this can happen during a Win10 feature update), and you corrected this by configuring bridging again and failed to remember it and mention it.

Ok, so I was wrong about the timing of the release for the general population. It seemed rapid to me because I had only recently updated to 6.1.16, just before 6.1.18 was released as it happens.

I only changed one VM, and yes, I could have reset something, but the other VMs were definitely not changed - and they started working again with 6.1.18.

The problem was, as I said, that the bridged networking was not available when "Bridged Adapter" was selected. I may have run afoul of a specific timing problem of Windows updates with VB updates - which would potentially not have been encountered by a user who updated VB to 6.1.16 soon after it's release.

My experience pointed to a problem. That's why I posted. That nobody else has jumped into this conversation would seem to point to the fact that my experience was unique. C'est la vie.