virtualbox.org

We're in a managed environment at work and need to disable bridged networking as an option on our OS X VirtualBox installations. I found a post with a similar question, but no responses back in 2011 (sorry, this is my first day in the forum and I can't post URLs. The post in this forum is called "Prevent virtual machines network access")

and in the VirtualBox manual section 2.1.2 I see explicit instructions for doing this on Windows installations by using the ADDLOCAL parameter with msiexec. However, in the OS X installation section of the manual (2.2) There are no similar instructions for passing these parameters to the installer.

Is this possible on managed OS X installations? Has anyone set up anything similar? Any help is greatly appreciated.

In Windows you have the option to not install bridged networking at installation time. Does that option not exist in the OS X version?

You could try to disable the .kext, but I'm not sure of the effects that this would have.

BillG wrote:In Windows you have the option to not install bridged networking at installation time. Does that option not exist in the OS X version?

Yeah, I saw the documented method for doing this in Windows. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent option for the OS X installation. At least not in the documentation. I was hoping maybe someone had some insight.

socratis wrote:You could try to disable the .kext, but I'm not sure of the effects that this would have.

That's a good thought. I'm going to try that out in a test environment.

For the record, this seems to have worked. All I had to do was remove all references to VBoxNetFlt.kext in

/Library/Application Support/VirtualBox/LaunchDaemons/VirtualBoxStartup.sh

and restart the Mac. This disables bridged networking, but unfortunately "Bridged Adapter" is still available as an option for network adapters in the GUI, which causes errors if it is selected and the VM is started up. However, this should be good enough for our purposes. We've still got a little more testing to do, but it looks good so far.

Thanks for the feedback on this!

FWIW, I tried installing VBox in a Windows VM (hey, that's what VMs are for, testing, right?) where I chose not to install the bridged adapter. I was still able to select the bridged adapter in the VBox GUI afterwards. The setup was a little bit complicated, but somehow I believe I got an address none the less. Will repeat and post, but it would be nice if a real system was tested by someone that has a Windows machine.

Yeap, did it again.
- Windows 7 VM with host-only adapter, IP 192.168.100.110 (I've changed the default 192.168.56.# to 192.168.100.#).
- Installed VirtualBox without the bridged adapter.
- Installed WinXP. One NIC, selected Bridged adapter. No complaints.
- WinXP gets an IP of 192.168.100.111.
- Go figure...

I'm getting the same things on a Windows host. I install Virtualbox with the Bridged Networking option disabled and I can still create a bridged network adapter. Whereas on OS X, after disabling VBoxNetFlt.kext in the VirtualBoxStartup.sh script, I can't.