Bridged Networking with HiPath SIcurity Card

[gstanden]

Hi,
I run my native windows partition as a virtual machine using the vmdk rawdisk method. This way I can leverage the 8Gb of RAM my corporate laptop can support, while still being able to run my Windows XP 32-bit corporate image that is on the harddisk in this laptop. So I open up my corporate Windows XP in VirtualBox this way - works great - and then I have other VM's I can run alongside, and, wired networking even works ok (bridged) so that I can get the "virtualized" incarnation of my Windows XP image up on the corporate network (but only via the wired interface).

That brief background brings me to my question. This uber-corporate laptop uses some kind of built-in security card (it's called an HiPath SIcurity Card) to authenticate to the wireless network. Also, it has a nice feature (when you boot the XP natively only) that if you pull off the wired network, it automagically switches you over to the wireless network.

That is my problem. I can't get the wireless networking to work when I open the XP native installation in Virtualbox. The wired works fine, but the wireless does not. I've tried bridging the virtual adapter to the wireless card, but I think that the HiPath SIcurity card looks for the Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200 Card. When I open the XP up in virtual boot, I can see the HiPath card has a red failure x mark next to it, but it seems locked down, I can't find logs or anything to explain what problem it encountered. I am guessing the problem it hits is it is looking for this Intel Centrino Advanced-N card, but it finds a virtualized NIC and fails somehow.

Any ideas on how to get this to work? Anyone seen this before?

Thanks,
Gil

[Sasquatch]

If the card is build-in, then get your Host on the wifi. When that works, your Guest should be able to hop on that connection and obtain a network address and get on the LAN through that.
If you need some sort of authentication before you can get on the network or an IP address, then we need to think of something else.

[BillG]

Have you talked to your corporate network guy? He is really the person most likely to know how the security card system works. On the other hand, he might not be too happy with the way you are running the corporate laptop.

[gstanden]

Thanks all for the replies, they are very much appreciated!!
I can't put the host on the wifi unfortunately, because I don't know (and afaik can't get) the wireless password for the secure wireless network. That's why they use this HiPath SIcurity system. The password for the wireless LAN is encrypted and built-in somewhere (I haven't been able to even find the encrypted password so far) and it all works automagically. We are never given an actual password. Therein is the problem. Somehow, the native build on this laptop which I am opening in VBox has to somehow (if possible) be able to "natively", if you will, access the wireless card because I think the HiPath is setup to look for that particular card and so the virtualized cards cause HiPath Sicurity to complain and not connect.

All great ideas though. Thanks. Maybe I will have to be happy for now with being able to at least get wired connectivity.

Talking to corporate network guy probably isn't an option. As you say, I'm not sure they would be to eager to support this, even though I absolutely need it so that I can use the 7.5 Gb of extra memory that the XP native 32-bit boot would waste (I need it to run virtual machines for project work). This was my solution to relieve the problem of hauling around 2 laptops...

Thanks again!
Gil

[Sasquatch]

May not be very on topic for this forum, but check out pcsc in the Ubuntu repo. Maybe that will give you your wifi connection on the Host. When you have that going, you can see if the VM can work with the wifi bridged on it.

[gstanden]

Hi, well, I solved this finally, so I'm posting the recipe to hopefully save others the many hours it took to solve this.

The basic approach, which is really very simple (dunno why I didn't think of this sooner) is just to get a USB wireless ethernet adapter, then install the virtualbox extension for USB 2.0 EHCI, then make the usb known to the windows virtual machine (make it a permanent usb load in the "settings" page of the windows vm. In addition to the usb wireless adapter, you also have to be sure to make the Smart Card Reader a permanent usb loadup too (in the case of my laptop, the smart card reader is usb, but it is built in somewhere inside the laptop).

Next, you have to find a wireless usb ethernet adapater that plays nice with the hi path security card. Note, this is not a hack. You still have to authenticate via the hi path security card. However, via usb, and the virtualbox EHCI usb 2.0 interface, you are giving the Windows VM an "actual" wireless adapter. Anyway, I tried several usb adapaters - a new but very unsophisticated Belkin 150 (34.99) and a Netgear WG111 but both of these had problems. The Belkin would not connect at all, and the Netgear was flaky, but for the most part did not work, although sometimes it would connect.

After hours and hours of working with this, I went home to sleep. In the morning, I rummaged through my IT cabinet, and found a very old - at least 5 years - Belkin F5D7050B 54Mbps 802.11g usb wireless ethernet adapter, and this worked. It does have some minor problems that I can live with for now. For one thing, it won't connect up during boot usually (although sometimes it does), whereas the PCI wireless onboard card always connects when I boot windows in native mode. Also, it seems to have some trouble finding networks at first after boot, so usually it takes 2-3 minutes after the desktop is up before it finds the wireless networks and authenticates and connects. I guess I can live with that, if it means I can return all these unopened network cards I was going to try

The Hi Path card, contrary to what I thought before, doesn't play favorites, and if it finds a suitable wireless network adapter available, which it can configure, it just grabs it and connects. I had though previously that it was set to look for a specific type of card - that was not the case.

Also, I think I mentioned that I am running Linux Mint 10 (an Ubuntu Fork) on a pendrive, as I had mentioned above, I need to restrict how much memory the Windows XP native os uses on this 8GB memory equipped laptop, so that I can run other OS's in Ubuntu 64-bit for work we are doing here at the company. I had had issues with the pendrive being a little buggy, so I also upgraded to a Patriot Bolt 8Gb USB drive, which has a significantly boosted Burst speed (nearly 20Mb/sec) and it is definitely much more responsive OS now that it runs on the Patriot Bolt 8Gb usb stick.

The USB stick used for the Linux 64-bit OS is important I think. Speed really matters in this situation. I thought about it and realized that the usb wireless adapter is going through the usb physical port, then through the virtualbox usb EHCI 2.0 software adapater, and ultimately talks to an OS that is itself running on a USB stick (the Patriot Bolt) so it seems like the actual details of the bus routes for this setup could be trickier than usual at the detail level, and so we need speed here for such setup.

I think that's about it. With enough tweaking and maybe the latest Gear gear, one could get all the bugs out of this I'm sure. The basic approach works great.

Thanks,
Gil

[gstanden]

Hi,

Update: The ASUS USB-N10 small form factor "stubby" Wireless-N usb ethernet adapter works perfectly. Network is acquired during bootup. $19.99 at MicroCenter, fairly low-price solution!

Gil