Host only networking no longer working

[Greg K]

Hi,

I got host only networking set up on my Ubuntu guest while I was on holiday so I could use my guest server offline. I booted it this morning and can no longer access it. My Ubuntu guest has two NICs, the first is NAT, the second is the host only adapter.


Previously I could connect to my guest on the IP 192.168.21.20. Now I can't even ping it and ssh is unresponsive.

When the VM guest is running I get a virtual adapter in OSX (manually configured):

vboxnet0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
ether 0a:00:27:00:00:00
inet 192.168.21.19 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.21.255

In the Ubuntu guest I have the following interfaces set up:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.21.20
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.21.0
broadcast 192.168.21.255

I'd list ifconfig output from the guest here if I could copy the output but because I can't SSH to my guest, I can't copy any text since the VBox window doesn't support text selection (on OSX anyway).

I access the host from the guest using the IP 192.168.21.19. This morning the guest cannot see the host on this address. I upgraded to VBox 3.2.6 this morning to see if it would help, the problem remains.

Any ideas? I can post more configuration info on request.

[Greg K]

Lord knows why this fell over. I gave up fiddling with host only networking and reverted back to a bridge connection in the end. Now I'm on a net connection 99% of the time I can survive using bridged.

The down side is I keep having to update my /etc/fstab with remote hosts IP addresses as my host moves between networks using DHCP. Not a huge problem but this was remedied using host only networking as I used to be able to access it on a static IP of 192.168.21.19.