[vbox-dev] Bug (?) in 6.1.16 r140961

[Dan Egli]

I have discovered something that I think needs to be addressed. When 
VirtualBox is first installed, the installer creates the "host only" 
network adapter, and gives it a DHCP range of 192.168.56.101 - 254. 
That's great, but the problem is that if you later go in and UNCHECK the 
DHCP active box in the host-only network settings, it disables all the 
fields, but DOESN'T kill the VirtualBox DHCP server! I was scratching my 
head for some time when I saw a machine grabbing a 192.168.56.101 
address when the DHCP server I started running on the host only network 
has a range of 192.168.10.135 - 253. It wasn't until I remembered that 
192.168.56/0 is the Virtual Box default DHCP range that I wondered. So I 
went into settings and saw that it was disabled. But that didn't stop 
it. I could see in my logs that MY DHCP server was hearing the request 
and offering an IP, but that the offer was never acknowledged. Finally, 
on a whim, I opened Task Manager on Windows 10. Sure enough, not one 
but  THREE Virtual Box DHCP Server processes were running. I killed the 
first, and all three went away. Once that was done the virtual box 
requested an received an IP from MY DHCP server just fine.

In future versions, can there please be a simple bit of code that checks 
the status of the DHCP server and if it's disabled in the settings, kill 
any running instances?

-- 
Dan Egli
 From my Test Server