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I'm having an issue with bridged networking and guests not being able to get their IP addresses. I've seen a lot of other posts from people with similar issues, but no solutions that have worked for me. I've used WireShark to try and figure out what's going on, and it looks like the bridged adapter is not correctly passing some UDP packets to the guest for some reason.

When I request an IP address from the guest (ipconfig /renew), the command returns after a couple of minutes with the message, "An error occurred while renewing interface Local Area Connection : unable to contact your DHCP server. Request has timed out."

The WireShark capture on the host shows repeated DHCP Discover packets, each followed by a DHCP Offer from the domain controller. All these messages have the correct client MAC address (that of the guest). It also shows some DHCP Inform packets which are (apparently) intended for the host (as well as the host's Ack in response). The WireShark capture on the guest shows the DHCP Discover packets. It does not show the DHCP Offer packets, but it does show the DHCP Inform packets (which were meant for the host). So it appears that the broadcast packets which are intended for the guest are not getting to the guest; but those intended for the host are? I'm not enough of a networking guy to really grok what is going on here. Here are the capture files from WireShark if that helps. Anyway, here is my setup:

• Host is Windows 7 x64, network adapter is Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN
• Guest is Windows 2008 R2 x64
• VirtualBox version 4.2.18

I am currently working around this by using NAT networking, which works fine but is going to eventually present problems for me.

Thank you for your time!

This is not unusual with wireless networks. The extra security in wireless (because it is broadcast, not on the wire) makes it difficult to hijack the host traffic and filter it, which is what the VirtualBox filter driver has to do.

Updating the wireless NIC driver sometimes helps, but if the problem is at the DHCP end (a DSL router?) it may not be possible to get it going.

Thanks, I was afraid it had something to do with being on wireless. What sort of problem might it be on the DHCP end? I'm in a corporate environment and our DHCP is provided by Active Directory.