Problem connecting to network.

[jtalafous]

I have an XP guest and an XP host running NAT. I can ping my host OK and my host's gateway OK from inside the guest, but I cannot ping an outside box like www.google.com, even with their numerical IP address, because ping reports "Request timed out".

ipconfig reports:

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 2:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : cboent.cbo.com
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.0.2.15
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 10.0.2.2

I have no problems with the host, browser works OK.

What should I do? Thanks for any help.

[Sasquatch]

Please tell your network layout. You might be on a corporate network with advanced network security or firewalls that prevent VM usage, in one way or another. Like you might need to authenticate on the network before you have connectivity.

[jtalafous]

Thanks for replying. Yes, I am inside a corporate network and there is most surely some firewalls in place. If there is any info you need, let me know what command to run and I will send the results.

After reading the user manual, I was under the impression that NAT did something like IP Masquerading so that any traffic coming from the guest would be "wrapped" to look like the host. If I am understanding NAT correctly, I would expect that if I can get out of our firewall with the host, then the guest necessarily gets out too.

But it may be the case that my system admin (I am in a domain on XP) has set some policy on my host that turns off something that the NAT needs? I am nowhere near a network engineer to know exactly what...

[Sasquatch]

It's possible you need a proxy or something to do all the internet things, so you need to set it up inside the Guest too. Another option is that you need to authenticate on the network first, like I said before, before you can use the network. The Host doesn't always do this properly when coming from a Guest, so you need to use the same authentication on the Guest as well.
Since this is on a corporate network, you really need your admin to help you. Since you don't exactly know how the network is configured, and neither do we, we can't help you any further without his/her help.

[jtalafous]

Appreciate the quick help. I will post here after I talk to my SA.

[jtalafous]

Sasquatch,

My system admin supplied me with a network proxy IP address which works with at least port 80, maybe more. Does this help me?

Thanks!

[Sasquatch]

A proxy will allow you to access websites, so that's a start. Nothing more we can do if you want to be able to do more.

[jtalafous]

Well, it's better than nothing. What do I do with this proxy's ip addr? How do I add it to the Virtual Machine or to the XP?

[Sasquatch]

How is it used on the Host? Then you know how to use it on the Guest. Dump the question "how to use a proxy" in Google and you'll get the answer as well. It would be too easy if we spelled everything out for you.

[jtalafous]

too true

[BillG]

I thought that Sasquatch was very patient. Most of this has nothing at all to do with VirtualBox. It is standard corporate networking procedure. Only the "use bridged networking" was VirtualBox related.