or, “What happened to VboxAddIf?!”

I decided to upgrade to Virtualbox 2.1 the other day as I wanted to keep up to date. It’s a great bit of software.

One of the VMs I use regularly runs Debian and serves as a development environment and a nagios server for monitoring the various sites I host here at beplacid.net. Unfortunately, a command I relied on regularly was VBoxAddIf to setup a bridged network device between my host (also Debian) and the guest instance. According to this bug report, networking has been completely rewritten in VirtualBox 2.x, therefore VBoxAddIf (the script) is no longer relevant.

There are two ways you can fix this: use the GUI to configure the VM to use one of your host devices, or if you’re headless, setup the network using VBoxManage modifyvm. The user manual (section 8.5.3) has the best collection of information on it. For me, I do the following to force the VM to use my previously created bridge device br0. It’ll do for now until I’ve got more time to investigate and do it properly:

VBoxManage modifyvm debian -nic1 hostif -hostifdev1 br0

You’ll need to run the command while the VM is not running.