Troubleshooting VirtualBox Network Issues

[daved31415]

Hello,

First off I would like to set my expectations with this thread - I do not expect to receive an answer that solves my problem. If that happens, great, but I expect at best to receive pointers to other software, educational material, specific topics / keywords to research, or similar which may help me better troubleshoot my problem.

Now for the issue...

I am working with a high-speed computer vision hardware which connects to a Windows 7 PC via Ethernet. The (proprietary) software requires a certain "Ethernet configuration" to be executed during installation, which I've been told simply undoes a Microsoft Update modification on a single Ethernet port (I have no more specifics but am willing to go through trials and errors to figure this out more but I am not sure where to start).

The Ethernet adapter must be set to a specific IP & subnet mask.

I would like to run a second Windows 7 OS inside a VirtualBox VM and connect it to the hardware instead. I've spent hours making changes to the Host and Guest network settings and haven't been able to establish connectivity using the control software. I have been able to ping the device but that's where my success has ended. There is an SDK available for the device but again I'm looking for ideas on where to even start troubleshooting this. I have reached out to tech support and looked for other similar cases but the company is very small and I got nowhere with either.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[michaln]

You left out explaining what you actually tried and how your VM is configured networking-wise. Which is why no one can say anything particularly helpful.

[daved31415]

You left out explaining what you actually tried and how your VM is configured networking-wise. Which is why no one can say anything particularly helpful.

Thanks for the tip. I'm going to make this a long-term project and use it as a starting point to learn more about networking. I feel I need to better understand what is happening at a lower level before I can even ask the right questions in this sort of situation. Bridging adapters and replicating the host adapter worked with a competing VM product — I had tried network bridges with VirtualBox but it did not resolve the issue for me.

[michaln]

You still didn't say what you actually tried and what the results were. You just said you tried bridged networking but that doesn't mean much per se.

Please understand that you are doing something rather unusual. I don't know about others, but I am not willing to spend my time trying to guess what you did and what might have gone wrong. You need to describe in detail how you set things up, what you tried, and what doesn't work. You probably did not use the defaults for the Windows 7 guest's networking.

There are simply too many things that could have gone wrong (true of networking in general). It's hard to guess exactly what it was when the only available information is "it doesn't work".