W7: No network connectivity over dedicated NIC

I have Windows 7 running on Virtual Box 4.1.8 r75467 and I also saw this with 4.1.10, and since this worked before for a while with 4.1.8, this is indicating that it may not be a virtual box issue.

SimH with Ubuntu Linux on the same system is not having any communications problems.

The host for Virtual box is MAC OS-X 10.6.8 quad processor.

The symptoms that started last week is that the FreeAXP system can only communicate with the Windows 7 system over TCP/IP, but can not communicate with the MAC OS-X host or the outside word.

It is like there is some firewall blocking the packets. The Windows Firewall is turned off.

On the network interfaces used by FreeAXP, no windows networking protocols are bound.

If I bind TCP/IP to the interface used by FreeAXP on Windows, then Windows can communicate over it to the outside world.

The interfaces on Virtual box are set to Promiscuous Mode: Allow VMs.

I have a Orecle Virtualbox as well on a Ubuntu 11.10 Desktop host. I have VirtualBox 4.10r76785 which I upgraded last week. I have a FreeAXP on windows 7 guest and have bridged lan communication. Everything works fine I can telnet the FreeAXP machine from the host machine. Have you checked the FreeAXP config if the mac address is correct.

Thein

I upgraded to VirtualBox 1.10r76785 and totally rebuilt the Windows VM and installed both the guest additions and RedHat paravirtualized network drivers.

Still did not work.

Changed the bridged network adapter to Promiscuous mode all, and rebooted the Windows VM.

On restart, I had connectivity for a while, then it stopped. It is looking like if either the network or the host gets loaded, that something gets stuck in the network driver until the Windows VM is rebooted.

My next step is to fall back to VirtualBox 3.1.8, which I had ran for a long time in this cluster configuration.

For what it is worth, if you are just using TCP/IP on VMS, you should not need promiscuous mode. It only comes into play when using DECnet Phase IV. Some of our customers also tell us it is better to segment the VMS system on its own v-switch.

I have a cluster running on this system, a second VM is running Ubuntu and SimH VAX.

My intention was to force the cluster traffic over the internal virtual network.

However, it looks like running a cluster is not practical on a Laptop. While a standalone VMS system sometimes handle the hibernate for a move, the cluster almost always clu-exits and crashes.

So I am looking at changing to having two independent nodes that use NFS to share storage.

I have also been using Decnet IV and LAT.