virtualbox.org

Hi,
I have Windows XP Pro 64bit installed in VB on Ubuntu 16.04.

The network is working for the usual things - Web browsing, downloading files. The problems however start when I attempt to activate a product. Initially it was Adobe CS4 suite, which I seem to be unable to activate from within the VB and now Proteus licence manager is reporting an error accessing the network. To make this explicit, both of the licences and installations are 100% legal - that is - legal copy and legal licence key.

Adobe fails with: Network error, try again later
Proteus(Labcenter Licence Manager 1.9) fails with: Failed to contact activation server [GLE=12029] Please ensure you are connected to the Internet.

Could anyone give me any idea where there may be a problem or at least where to start looking?

Many thanks in advance,
regards

I can't think of any reason that the VirtualBox network should fail you, since it's already shown it can do its job. Have you tried for example Adobe's troubleshooting guides? https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/pol ... -help.html

Are you using Bridged or NAT mode for your network? Any potential issues with your router blocking some ports? Or a firewall in your host?

And finally, the choice of your guest: WinXP-64 is a really rare product. Maybe it has issues of its own?

Hi and thank you for your reply.

I have tried both NAT and Bridged Adapter setting I've tried both with or without having the linux firewall turned on. It fails regardless the choice.
I also found a wireless USB adapter and installed it successfully (thus effectively bypassing the linux side of things as linux knows nothing of this usb network adapter) but even this is failing. As to the router - that is a possibility, although as far as i can say from the settings of the router, there's no restrictions / firewall turned on, so i do not think that is the source of my trouble. i'll try and connect through a mobile data somehow and see whether that solves anything (if i manage to get that working).

I have read through the troubleshooting guides of Adobe and checked / passed successfully all the requiremens to no avail. But as it does not limit my usage of the product (so far) I am not that pressed registering it. It is worse with Proteus which will not work without activation at all.

As far as I can say, all my firewalls are down but the problem persists and having had no problem with the same version of XP64 previously it seemed to me it could be a VB issue...

Choice WinXPx64 may be a bit strange, but that is the only legal version that i've got. I had the adobe suite working on it no problem, only when I finally decided to give up on Windows entirely and moved to Linux and VB for specifically so that I may keep using my purchased products, there seem to be problem with it.

In any case thank you for your reply and looking forward to more suggestions.
Regards

I'm running WinXPx64 in a guest on top of a vanilla kernel I build myself (latest = 4.7.3).

I setup my XP network connection using the Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop pseudo-adapter, and inside the XP
client I'm using the Intel MT Desktop driver.

I setup promiscuous mode to allow-all and have it attached via the Bridged Adapter --which is 1 member
of a real bridge on my linux box (i.e. I have eth0+eth5 setup as bridge "br0" on linux -- I wanted. They are bridged because, physically, they are running at different speeds.

Anyway, I don't know if I was supposed to attach my VM to one of the bridge-slaves or to the bridge, but I chose the 1Gb slave (eth0) instead of the bridge (br0). I.e. in this case, I have the bridge of the VM attaching to a a real bridge slave on my linux host, thinking (perhaps incorrectly) that it might not be a bad idea for a bridged adapter to connect to a real bridged port -- but that may make no difference, dunno.

The VM client appears to my internal net like any other computer on the internal net (192.168.0.x). For any internal clients to talk to the real world, they usually go through my squid proxy running on the host server, but for some activities (steam), it's been easier to allow internal clients to directly connect to the internet using iptables to allow outgoing and ingoing-related traffic -- which seams to work for poopy applications that are too stupid to go through the proxy -- even MSwin can/and does validate through the proxy, but various games now require online connections to allow play, and they don't usually support going through a proxy.

That said, I've used Adobe products that required network activation -- and they all worked fine through the proxy -- none of them needed any direct-connect networking setup through iptables.

So if they work through a proxy, I'm pretty sure they'd work direct-connected. In any event, how is your
Wxp64 client setup w/r/t networking? Is it on an internal net? If so, do you have your host setup to route traffic to and from that internal net (!somehow!, via proxy, or nat, or whatever?)? I assume you can ping your VM and it can ping other internal clients (maybe only the host if no other computers on your internal net). Is it setup to access the internet directly or via proxy?

If you are using a proxy, does IE6 (or 8 if you upgraded your XP client) connect w/no problems?

I am a bit surprised it's not working, but it took a while before I had my own networking needs get complicated enough that I learned what I needed for bridging. It *could* be something in your kernel, missing or misconfigured. Some vendors put various security and/or custom modules in their kernel - maybe a security module is blocking access or preventing your host from forwarding some types of traffic from the VM to the internet.

Conceptually, getting squid to work doesn't require as much networking knowledge as configuring your kernel to allow NATting or similar, but squid does require it's own basket of knowledge -- but it is also more forgiving to make mistakes configuring squid than mistakes configuring your kernel.

I also have IPv6 disabled on the host as well as the client -- dunno if that makes a difference. One issue I haven't tracked down yet, is the inability to login with a Domain-based account when the VM first comes up. Not sure why -- but if I log in w/root(admin), and look at some network folders on the server, I can usually log out and relogin w/a domain account (using samba as a domain controller).

I don't know how you have your network setup, but hopefully going through how mine is setup might help you think of what's going on in your situation.

Cheers!
A*a