Bridged Mode at public WIFI spots

[w0b1t]

I ran into a situation where bridged mode worked sometimes and then not.

I have Win7 Home Premium host (64bit), and my guests include SUSE 12.3 (64 bit), Win7 Pro (32 bit), and WinXP Pro SP3 (32 bit). For all guests I use paravirt network and tried to use bridged because it was recommended for performance reasons.

I only use internet when at some public WIFI spot. Typically these are one of library, McDonald's, or Dunkin Donuts (they are all close to where I live).

At the library, I can not get bridge mode to work period for any of my guests. No matter what I try. At either MD or DD it works fine. In addition, another difference I noted was that at the library I could not ping hosts on the internet, period. That's not the case for the other 2 sites.

Does anyone have an idea why this is so? (It is not a big deal to switch to NAT at lib, but I'd like to know why that is necessary.)

BTW I am using latest release 4.2.16, and have had no other issues.

Thanks in advance - w0b1t.

[BillG]

Since it works at two sites, the difference has to be the access points. My guess is that at the library the security is a bit tighter and it realizes that there is something odd about the connection (which there is, because VirtualBox has to use a bit of trickery to allow the guest to use the host's wireless connection using bridged mode). With NAT, this is hidden from the access point.