virtualbox.org

Maybe this is a bug, or maybe I am doing something wrong, but I'm having trouble with dual-NIC Ubuntu VMs in VirtualBox 2.2.4 run on an Ubuntu 9.04 i386 host. Maybe someone else has run into something like this:

I have two single-NIC Ubuntu VMs that are configured to use Internal Networking, with the default network name "intnet". They come up on the
same subnet and can ping each other. This is good.

I have a dual-NIC Ubuntu VM as well. If I set each NIC to Bridged Adapter, they both get IP addresses on the same subnet as my host. This
is good, too. However, if I change the second adapter to use Internal Networking on "intnet" Ubuntu doesn't assign it an IP address, nor can
it get one on that interface. This is bad. If I change both adapters to use Internal Networking on "intnet", neither interface is assigned an
IP address. I have tried manually assigning address, netmask, and broadcast, but that doesn't yield success.

My guess is that this behavior points to a bug in VirtualBox, but it's also possible that I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing. My
ultimate goal is to have a server VM with eth0 on my host's LAN and eth1 on its own subnet, where eth0 of a client VM is on the same subnet as
the server VM's eth1.

Can anyone see anything I'm doing wrong?

You shouldnt get addresses on intnet unless you have set another guest as a dhcp server.
So manually assign ipaddress and netmask and make sure they are on the same network as your other guests. Also make sure that this range is different from your other network.

If that doesn't help then post the setting you are trying with, also how the ip:s looks for your other interface in that guest.

THANK YOU! I wondered why my guests were being assigned addresses, when the VirtualBox docs suggest you need to explicitly set up a DHCP server in VirtualBox for the given internal network name, and I had verified that there wasn't one. Turns out that VirtualBox does indeed work as it's supposed to.

Problem solved, but for the curious, here's what happened: I have a partially-configured dual-NIC virtual server that does have a DHCP server on it, but I didn't realize it at the time. As long as it was running, other guests on the same internal network got addresses and could ping each other, except the virtual server NIC got nothing (likely a configuration problem for it). Then I had to power down a VM to do more testing, and I powered down the virtual server (unwittingly taking away the DHCP server) and tested a new dual-NIC VM, which is what made me think there was a problem.