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Hey All,

I have had a lot of success running a few VMs with a Host-Only adapter. Recently however, the IPv4 address and subnet mask of my Host-Only Adapter resets itself everytime I restart my computer to 169.254.183.211 and 255.255.0.0 respectively. This breaks my host only network because I count on it being 192.168.56.1, and all of the VM's IP addresses are in the 192.168.56.0/24 range. When I go into Host-Only Network Details and change the IP address and subnet mask to 192.168.56.1 and 255.255.255.0 and apply the changes, it appears the changes do not take affect because if I go back to the same configuration window, the IP address and subnet mask are still 169.254.183.211 and 255.255.0.0.

Any advice?

beedaan wrote:I have had a lot of success running a few VMs with a Host-Only adapter. Recently however, the IPv4 address and subnet mask of my Host-Only Adapter resets itself everytime I restart my computer to 169.254.183.211 and 255.255.0.0 respectively.

Who exactly has this 169.254.183.211 address? I assume you mean the guest, since the host IP is fixed. I'm not an expert, but I believe the 169.etc addres is something that Windows uses as a default until it is assigned something by the DHCP server. In your case it seems that it can't see a DHCP server. Check VirtualBox's preferences to make sure you haven't disabled either the host only network or its DHCP server, nor done anything else silly such as bridging the host only virtual network to a physical network.

mpack wrote:

beedaan wrote:I have had a lot of success running a few VMs with a Host-Only adapter. Recently however, the IPv4 address and subnet mask of my Host-Only Adapter resets itself everytime I restart my computer to 169.254.183.211 and 255.255.0.0 respectively.

Who exactly has this 169.254.183.211 address? I assume you mean the guest, since the host IP is fixed. I'm not an expert, but I believe the 169.etc addres is something that Windows uses as a default until it is assigned something by the DHCP server. In your case it seems that it can't see a DHCP server. Check VirtualBox's preferences to make sure you haven't disabled either the host only network or its DHCP server, nor done anything else silly such as bridging the host only virtual network to a physical network.

Sorry for the confusion. 169.254.183.211 was the IP address of the Host-Only adapter.

I found the problem. I had gone into the Network Connections Manager of Windows and manually set a static IP address of the Virtual Box Host-Only Ethernet adapter to 192.168.56.1. Then, via VirtualBox Preferences, I would try to change the IP address of the Host-Only Adapter to 192.168.56.1. I would apply the settings but they would never take because the IP address was already in use! By the same network interface!

So, to solve the problem, I set the IP address of the the adapter to obtain IP address automatically via the Windows Network Manager. Then, I was able to set the IP address via the VirtualBox preferences.

Kind of confusing, I hope I described that clearly enough. Please let me know if you have any questions

I have no questions, but I do have an observation, which is that the IP address of the host only adapter is normally set in the VBox GUI preferences. The adapter includes a DHCP server, so the host should not be assigning IP addresses to it as well.

ps. This conversation is no longer generic. Moving it to "Windows Hosts".