dealing with the host net adapter.

[edstevens]

Host OS , win 7 home premium, 64-bit. 8gb ram, 500gb HD.

Running quite well with v4.2.16, hosting several Oracle Linux 5 guests. Finally got tired of the daily nag about upgrading to 4.2.18, so I installed it. Then the nightmares started. First, the "VirtualBox Host-Only Network adapter" wouldn't hold its IP address at 192.168.56.1. I tried several times to reset it from the VirtualBox Manager - file - preferences - network. It just wouldn't take. Finally went back to VirtualBox Manager - file - preferences - network. and deleted the recreated the net adapter. Still no joy. It seemed to simply ignore the fact I was telling it what IP address to use. Finally I un-installed 4.2.18, then installed v4.2.16 again. Now on installation, at the very end, it tells me "cannot rename this connection". Now I do have an adapter at 192.168.56.1 -- but it is named simply "Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 3", but 'ipconfig -a' reveals it has a "description" of "VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter". So its working, but leaves me with the uneasy feeling that something is amiss. Why the pop-up about not being able to rename the connection? After digging around on some MS sites, I landed in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}, where the next level revealed a connection with the NAME property of "VirtualBox Host-Only Network", and another connection with the NAME property of "Local Area Connection 3". My working theory is that VBox first creates a net adapter with a generic name, then tries to rename it as "VirtualBox Host-Only Network", but somewhere along the line, the connection name "VirtualBox Host-Only Network" was left hanging in the registry and resulted in the error message and the adapter left with the generic name.
Does this sound about right?

Any ideas on how I can really clean this up and move forward with v4.2.18 AND a stable address for the host-only adapter?

[noteirak]

Your conclusion is right, that is the issue that prevents renaming connections in Windows. You can safely delete old reccords that are not present anymore on your system, and reboot.
What I would recommend is to uninstall Virtualbox, reboot, then install again, instead of installing over what existed.

[edstevens]

Your conclusion is right, that is the issue that prevents renaming connections in Windows. You can safely delete old reccords that are not present anymore on your system, and reboot.
What I would recommend is to uninstall Virtualbox, reboot, then install again, instead of installing over what existed.

Ok, I approached it fresh. I had already uninstalled VBox prior to my last reboot. This time I took a restore point and deleted the entry from the registry. rebooted. Installed v 4.2.18. This time it installed without complaint, but the net adapter was still labeled simply "Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 3" and had a strange IP address (I didn't make a note of it) with a net mask of 255.255.0.0 .. Uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled. This time everything went as it should. No complaints about renaming anything, the host-only adapter is properly identified, and it has the expected IP address of 192.168.56.1.

FWIW, it also came up identifying a previously defined VM, even though I don't place my vm's in the freshoutofthebox default location. That tells me that VBox stores that configuration info (where to place the vm's) someplace that doesn't get cleaned up on an un-install operation.

But I guess for now things are at least back to "normal" with 4.2.18. This was on my personal laptop. I have another machine running 4.2.16 where I have my full-blown working lab - 7 carefully configured vms in all. I'm not sure I want to risk trying to upgrade that one after this fiasco.