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Hi,

I use several USB adapters on my host and used to be able to bridge them with guests without issue on Windows 7. Now that I am on Windows 10, the adapters don't show up in the adapter drop down unless IPv4/IPv6 is enabled on the adapter in Windows. On 7, I would uncheck everything except VirtualBox Bridged and it would work. I don't want the adapter to work on the host, just in the guest, so I need to prevent it from getting an IP on the host machine. Any ideas? Thanks

oleg106 wrote:Hi,

I don't want the adapter to work on the host, just in the guest, so I need to prevent it from getting an IP on the host machine.

I do not mean to suggest that you are trying to use the functionality incorrectly, but.... The guide states that the purpose of bridged mode is to let your guest interact with the host's subnet: "This allows VirtualBox to intercept data from the physical network and inject data into it, effectively creating a new network interface in software." Regardless of how may have used it in Windows 7, it is designed for this purpose. So, one has to ask, why use bridged mode if you do not want to bridge to host's subnet?

On the other hand, since you simply want to avoid getting an IP on the host, have you tried to remove the IP address in the adapter or use one not in the host's subnet? If you take it off DHCP, it should just fail to get an IP. Using the adapter Properties dialogue, deselect the option to "Obtain an IP address automatically" and save it with no settings in there.

My intention is to dedicate the adapter entirely to the guest, and this worked quite well in Windows 7. I am pretty sure enabling VB bridging on the adapter was the correct way to accomplish this, but it does not work in Windows 10, and I am wondering if there is some other way to do it.

Well, I have bridged working fine on Windows 10 host. Have you tried my other suggestions? When you say "dedicate the adapter to the guest", what exactly does that mean if not transporting network data?

The situation described in the original post is not unusual and is not restricted to Windows 7. Clearing all checkboxes in the host's NIC properties except the bridged networking driver was a common way to dedicate a bridged NIC to vm use. Unfortunately it does not work reliably in v5.0.x . It appears to work with some NIC drivers but not others.

There have been many posts about this behaviour and I believe there is also a report on bugtracker. It still does not work for me with v5.0.10 and Realtek GB NIC in the host. There are a few other networking oddities with v5.0.x . I suspect that they are caused by the changes made in VirtualBox to work with the Windows 10 network changes.

BillG wrote:The situation described in the original post is not unusual and is not restricted to Windows 7. Clearing all checkboxes in the host's NIC properties except the bridged networking driver was a common way to dedicate a bridged NIC to vm use. Unfortunately it does not work reliably in v5.0.x . It appears to work with some NIC drivers but not others.

There have been many posts about this behaviour and I believe there is also a report on bugtracker. It still does not work for me with v5.0.10 and Realtek GB NIC in the host. There are a few other networking oddities with v5.0.x . I suspect that they are caused by the changes made in VirtualBox to work with the Windows 10 network changes.

Ah, so It's a VB 5 issue, not Windows 10. Makes sense, thanks for the info.