Opened 12 years ago
Last modified 12 years ago
#9972 new enhancement
Connection sharing for host-only networking
| Reported by: | Brian Candler | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Component: | network | Version: | VirtualBox 4.1.6 |
| Keywords: | Cc: | ||
| Guest type: | other | Host type: | Mac OS X |
Description
VBox under OSX offers these networking choices:
- Host-only networking, where the guests can see each other and the host, but cannot reach the Internet
- NAT, where the guest can make outbound connections to the Internet, but is not reachable from other guests or the hosts (except by means of port forwarding)
This means that if you want guests to form a local network but also be able to download updates from the Internet you need to configure them with two NICs, one of each type. Or else you can set up another VM as a gateway running IP masquerading, but to use this you need to set an explicit default gateway on each of the other guests.
It would be very useful if Host-only networking could allow outbound connections via the Host using NAT. For Linux this would probably just require an iptables rule. In the case of OSX, I think the cleanest way to do this would be to expose the vboxnet interfaces in the Internet Sharing settings (System Preferences > Internet and Wireless > Sharing > Internet Sharing). It would also be necessary to return a gateway in the DHCP response (see #9970)
Possibly related to #1705 (but here I'm thinking specifically of OSX Internet sharing)