Can't get public and private subnets to work

[Craig5479Anderson]

My bad on eth3, I meant eth2. I am trying to make it online but without the proper set up it will not come up. I tried 'service network restart' and 'ifconfig eth2 up' but no change. It seems there is still a setup problem. Not sure where to look next

[noteirak]

I guess I see it differently. Normally the MAC Address is provided by a physical interface, here it is set by VirtualBox using logic I am not familiar with. Normally I set the OS to use DHCP and it automatically sets things up, here it does not. Normally if I need to set up static IPs I enter my router IP as the GATEWAY but here that does not work. The way I see it everything so far has been about how VituralBox provides networking in a totally virtual environment. Read up on networking is not likely to help me understand what VirtualBox is doing or how to set it up. If I am way off please point out the flaw in my thinking.

In this case, the MAC is only a way to match your config script with an actual hardware, so you can give it a name (ethX) and a configuration. There is no reason to change it or to try to do anything MAC related. It is merely an ID.

I tried 'service network restart' and 'ifconfig eth2 up' but no change. It seems there is still a setup problem. Not sure where to look next

In the logs of the guest. If the interface doesn't come up, there has to be an error somewhere. Find it, and solve it.

[Craig5479Anderson]

You are absolutely correct sir. I was leaning on your expertise in this area to help solve this last part of the problem when, in fact, it was something I should be able to fix. Once I started ignoring the virtual aspect and started troubleshooting the networking issue as if it were on a physical node I found the issue. At one point I had unconnected the Cable Connected checkbox in the VM Manager to isolate the previous problem to just eth0/1. I now have 3 working interfaces on each node. Thank you for your patience and expertise. I really do appreciate it.

[noteirak]

Just glad to see you managed to make it work!

You are right, and this is maybe the most important lesson here : bugs coming from Virtualbox for networking issues are very rare.
In almost all cases, it is simple a configuration issue and has nothing to do with Virtualbox per say.