virtualbox.org

Good morning,


I'm looking for some input on setting up networking for my windows xp guest...

Final Setup will be as follows:

1. Running Debian 6.0.4 as the host, with virtualbox 4.1.12

2. Guest OS is Windows XP 64bit - will be fully upto date on all updates (currently updating as I type).

3. 1 nic on the host machine, assigned a single static IP address given to me by co-location company, no other IP currently available

4. I want the Guest OS to have internet access - both ways as it is a game server, and be able to access things on the host OS


Currently, I'm running it in bridged mode on my network at home - but I noticed that in bridge mode, the guest OS gets assigned an IP from my DHCP server.


Is it possible to use bridge mode with a static Public IP on the host nic, but a private IP for the guest OS?

Or am I better of using NAT networking?


Goal is that the game server (guest) traffic will be filtered by the host OS firewall - eventually, guest will need to report to host OS various IP's that need to be added to the firewall for game server player management.

From what i have read, it sounds like if the host doesn't see guest traffic, then the firewall will only apply to the host.


This is the first time I have used bridge mode. Previously, I used NAT, but last time I did that it was a hassle setting up port forwarding. I like the idea of the bridge mode due to the fact that it doesn't require port forwarding through virtualbox - thus I only have to maintain one set of port rules and that is for the firewall.


Hope this has made sense... Old server died and have been scrambling to get this one ready and deployed - lots of late nights the past week.

Thanks for any input - either to help sort this out or a better method of accomplishing this, short of deploying more computers.


Data

This is basically a networking problem, not a VIrtualBox problem as such. Bridged networking puts the NIC in your vm into the same network as the physical NIC it is bridged to. For it to have direct Internet access you would need to bridge it to the NIC which gets the public IP and it would need to get its own public IP from the provider. If you cannot get a second public IP from the provider, direct access to the Internet from the guest is not possible.

If you are getting an IP from DHCP you must have the vm bridged to a NIC in your local network, not to the NIC which has Internet access. How you then configure it has nothing to do with VirtualBox. You would configure it just as you would configure any other (physical) machine in the local network.