virtualbox.org

Hello all,
I am running a Windows 11 Pro machine with a physical wired nic (builtin) and a physical wifi nic (builtin) and am running Oracle Virtualbox 7.2.0 r170228.

[Physical host and Intent]
I have a single oracle virtualbox vm with three network interfaces, running with ALMA Linux 10.2; kernel= 6.12.0-211.32.1. My intent is to have this machine be usable when I am at home running with a wired connection or a wifi connection, and when I am traveling with this laptop to ensure my VM can at least persist with access to the internet using the wifi connection.

I am not a network engineer by trade, but I have been supporting UNIX and Linux OSes for over 30 years; so my focus has usually been on the host side of things, not specifically networking.

[What I have in the VM]
One is a wired connection with a bridged adapter that uses my wifi router to obtain a DHCP lease on 192.168.2.0/24. One is a wireless connection with a bridged adapter that uses my wifi router to obtain a DHCP lease, also on 192.168.2.0/24. The third is a Host-Only adapter connection with an address on 10.50.0.0/24. How come the wired bridged adapter gets a DHCP lease without issue, and I can ping yahoo-dot-com; however, the wireless bridged adapter can get a DHCP lease without issue but cannot ping yahoo-dot-com?

Is my plan/goal/intent possible, so that all I have to do is boot my laptop, boot my VM and get to work? It is not working for me so far.

I posted the question in Gemini hoping to find answers and found this article viewtopic.php?t=82954, but its not precisely what I am trying to do nor matching my experiences. I do get an DHCP lease on both my wired NIC and wifi NIC within the VM without issue. THe problem is routing out to the internet.

This should work. It would be unreliable if both the wired and wifi NIC had a connection (because then one network is available on two NICs).

It's hard to say why you don't get ping responses. It should work, but it could be blocked by firewall rules on the host. Also it could be a side effect of what your wifi router does (or a glitch in the bridged-to-wifi code). Keep in mind that bridging to wifi isn't actually a bridge, it shares the MAC address of the host and performs IP based filtering. To find out more about what's going wrong with pings you'd have to take packet traces on the wifi NIC on the host...

@klaus

Thanks for the reply. It's been a busy week for me everywhere, in and out of the workplace. So sorry for the delayed response.

Thanks for the validation and the feedback with - "it should work." That tells me that I am not dealing with the same issue that was presented years ago.

Anyway, I guess I should shutdown my firewall and see if that makes a difference. That was a good pointer, that I think I neglected.

Also, do you think I need to do a full reboot of my WIndows laptop, which is running the Oracle VBox application and perhaps disable the "virtual wired NIC" as a potential workaround too? I just now thought of that. That's the benefit to not being tired while thinking about this stuff.