virtualbox.org

Hi,

I have an XP host with a server 2k3 guest which was set up before ESET & v3.1.0 were installed. The guest boots fine, but some time after login the network connections on the guest and the host begin to fail. Also operations such as opening a command prompt or my computer on the host take minutes to complete.

After a lot of head scratching it seems that while the guest is running, all communication with the domain controller gets blocked (ping -t times out). Switching off the firewall or closing the guest reinstates the communication.

The firewall is a company wide installation which I can't turn off or on at whim, so I was wondering if anyone was aware of either a different network config (currently using bridged as the server needs to be a domain member) or settings for ESET firewall which will stop this happening.

Thanks in advance

There are some network issues in VB or at least how it's setup. The network works great but it'll only work on my win7 x64 with the windows firewall, all other firewalls fail to install after I setup VB.

Check the Eset Firewall log, probably something that's triggering a block.

Good luck.
Simon

Well I had a look at the logs and once the virtual machine is running it comes up with port scan attacks from seemingly random local network addresses.

However un-ticking the eset firewall from the network connection within the windows network properties, then adding it back fixed the issue, so I guess it just needed a refresh to accept VBox. I tried rebooting the host & it's still working fine

When the VirtualBox guest is using a bridged adapter, I found that it's necessary to configure the ESET firewall to allow bridged connections.

In ESET, open Advanced Setup, browse to "Personal Firewall" - "IDS and advanced options", and check "Allow communication for bridged connections".

I believe we have ESET noted in the VirtualBox FAQ in the 'incompatible' list. It's a bit old though, newer versions and other software that isn't noted isn't tested.

@mieses: Thanks, the ESET setting was the solution for my problem, too.

Just to give others the chance to get here via different search terms, I will describe my (now solved) problem:
At some point I realized my guest machines had no more internet connection which they had before. But they did connect to my internal network. I was then running VirtualBox 4.1.12 on a Windows XP host. To narrow in I ran nslookup in the guests (Windows XP and 7, Server 2003) which all resulted in an error: "nslookup *** Can't find server name for address <dns server ip>". Yet I could ping the dns server address sucessfully.

So, nothing wrong with VirtualBox or any kind of network setting - just the effect of a meticulously working brave software firewall. Which can be told to allow this traffic from bridged connections as mieses explains in his posting. B.T.W. this setting is still present in ESET Endpoint Protection 5.0.