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I'm trying to get a Virtualbox instance running with a very specific networking setup.

Here's what I have right now:

I have a laptop running Ubuntu, hosting a Debian Virtualbox. My loptop regularly has dhcp addresses assigned to it's wireless card in either the 192.168.*.*** range or 10.***.***.*** range. I've set up my Debian VB with a bridged network adapter connected to my laptops's wlan0 connection.

The Debian machine always grabs a dynamic address, so if I want to access virtual hosts running on it, or want to ssh into it, I must first run ifconfig to find its ip address.

Here's what I want:

I want to set up the Debian virtual machine with another network adapter on a private network between my laptop and it, that will always have a static ip, no matter what dhcp address my laptop has.

How do I do this?

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migrated from serverfault.com Nov 14 '11 at 2:22

This question came from our site for system administrators and desktop support professionals.

2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Change the virtualbox network settings to Host-only networking and edit the following file in the virtual machine:

 /etc/network/interfaces

You can that change it to have a static IP like this:

iface eth0 inet static
       address 192.168.2.10
       netmask 255.255.255.0
       network 192.168.2.0
       broadcast 192.168.2.255
       gateway 192.168.2.1

Then, you should change the settings for the virtual Network Adaptor in Ubuntu to also have a static IP (192.168.2.1 in this example).

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I've never heard of this virtual network adapter in ubuntu. How do I go about editing it? – somethingkindawierd Nov 5 '11 at 23:31
Don't know by heart. Whats the result from ifconfig? – Bart De Vos Nov 5 '11 at 23:34
Hmm. I have it set up as you suggested. Virtualbox added an entry to my host so ifconfig shows the new network. However, my guest only has the loopback. If I try to add an entry for eth0 I get the error that there's no such device. – somethingkindawierd Nov 6 '11 at 0:11
After more reading and playing with settings I finally got it. Your settings proved correct. I had used Network Adapter 2, which equates to eth1, not eth0 on the host machine. Once I figure that out it was elementary to get your answer working. Thanks. – somethingkindawierd Nov 6 '11 at 4:56
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up vote 2 down vote

If like me, you happen to be on a Redhat based system like CentOS, just edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 with the following:

DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.56.101
NETMASK=255.255.255.0

Obviously, I've assigned the static IP to eth1 but you need to change it according to what ifconfig tell you.

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