Guest network connection broken after host hibernate

[ueli]

I have a Windows host and a Linux guest. The guest is always running. This setup has been working flawlessly for a few years, until recently, when I have replaced (not upgraded) the Win10 host by a Win11 machine. The details:

The guest's network adapter is set to bridged, using the "ASIX AX88179A USB 3.2 Gen 1 to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter".

As long as everything is up and running, there is no problem. But when I hibernate the host (or put it asleep) and wake it up later, it happens quite often that the guest's network connection appears to be broken. The host doesn't have a networking problem, it's only the guest.

When I do a ping on the guest to the router/dhcp-server, I get a diagnostic saying that the network is not reachable.

I can then go to the network settings and set the adapter to not attached, click ok, go to the network settings again and set the adapter to bridged (as it was before). This solves the problem reliably.

With the Win10 host I could rely on hibernate/wake-up cycles to not disrupt anything with the guest. Was I just lucky? Or is this unsupported? I'm using VBox 7.0.10 r 158379 (Qt5.15.2)

[arQon]

This has been covered at length over several years now: IIRC it originally broke all the way back in 5.xx. A forum search should give you all the details, along with some scriptable workarounds, but the TLDR is simply "don't use Bridged".

[ueli]

Meanwhile i found an easier way to get going again. When the guest's network connection is broken after a hibernate, I can pause/unpause the guest. This works most of the time. if not, a second pause/unpause uesually does the trick.

I suspect some sort of timeout. Win11 is incredibly sluggish in establishing all sorts of connections, including access to network drives. So either the guest OS or VBox should probably be a bit more patient. At least this is a way of explaining why the problem never occurred on my Win10 host.