virtualbox.org

I am new here so take it easy on me. I have been using VB for some time now. I have recently moved into the realm of being a certified penetration tester and wanted to set up a lab for this purpose. I have spent countless hours online reading everyone's opinion on how to best do this. I came across an article that said you can simply set it up as a host-only network. I quickly made my adjustments with in VB by going to File>Preferences>Network. I made sure that the adapter was in fact there. Next I clicked on the screwdriver to make sure it was configured. By default there is 192.168.56.1/255.255.255.0 in these fields and DHCP was unchecked. I rebooted my machine and everything seemed to be fine. With KALI Linux as my platform and Kioptrix Lv1 as my target I was able to do a netdiscover to locate the IP and an nmap to find the ports. It was working perfectly.

Notice I said was... that night I turned off the VM and shutdown the windows host machine. I came back the next day and nothing works. I entered the ip addr command and saw that I was pulling an IP of 192.168.56.10. However, I cannot find the Kioptrix machine with netdiscover, and nmap reveals nothing. I tried the same config on my other two laptops 1 Mac and 1 PC ,as well as on my work PC - nothing. I tried to uninstall all machines and VB, re-download from source and re-install -nothing. Now no matter what I do, I cannot get it to work. Please for the love of God and my sanity, some one help me.

I suggest you turn DHCP back on (which AFAIK is the default), and let the VM acquire an IP address automatically.

mpack,

I appreciate the quick response. I failed to mention that I have tried it with DHCP settings as well, and still no success. However, I am not so arrogant as to not re-check my work. I will check this tonight when I get home and make sure that the settings are configured properly. Again, thank you for the response as any help is appreciated.

Did you check what is the IP in the guest and try to ping/connect from the host?

noteirak,

Unfortunately I cannot get into the host machine as it is a vulnerable machine that I do not yet have the password for. However, the previous post regarding the DHCP seemed to solve my issue. When I turned DHCP back on, I noticed that the default subnet mask was changed to 255.255.250.0. When I changed this to 255.255.255.0 it worked right away. Thank you for your response though, I really do appreciate the help.