fedora/centos/virtualbox IP problems
 

Hi, my main box runs F16 and I set up a Centos 6 VM using VirtualBox 4.2.6. My router is addressed as 10.1.1.1. When I first connect to the VM I get an IP address allocated by DHCP and I can ping the host (10.1.1.51). I want to give this box a static IP address though (10.1.1.71).

So I modify the ifcfg-eth0 as described in the attachment. I stop NetworkManager and restart network. Now though, I can not ping the host. I get an eror message "host unreacheable".

Here is the /sbin/ifconfig data for the host:

[tim@enigmatic ~]$ /sbin/ifconfig p4p1
p4p1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 50:E5:49:19:7D:55
inet addr:10.1.1.51 Bcast:10.1.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::52e5:49ff:fe19:7d55/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:139830640 errors:0 dropped:13804 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:141181592 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:2
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:2087639226 (1.9 GiB) TX bytes:2651737436 (2.4 GiB)

A couple of things to note:

• I was advised that NetworkManager was not required if I define the address in the ifcfg-eth0 file. Hence it was stopped
• I am a bit concerned that the HWaddr is different between host & guest. Should I expect the same?

If I restart NetworkManager and return ifcfg-eth0 to remove the static IP address it works fine. DHCP allocates the address 10.0.2.15 and I can ping 10.1.1.51. Does this suggest I need to set up the VM to suit a different subnet?

Any thoughts appreciated. Cheers

When running virtualization SW in bridge mode for a virtualization guest to have it's own static IP the only thing to do commonly is to configure the LAN router to link the MAC address to an IP address so that when the virtualization guest asks for a DHCP lease, sending its unique MAC address, it will contain all the necessary network configuration. And while NetworkManager isn't required for it (all you need is a bare ethernet device configuration file, DHCP client and configuration file) you could configure it to just use DHCP and be done with it.

thanks unspawn. I am tinkering with virtualisation. DHCP will do

Cheers