How to use a virutalbox guests as a servers?07.12.13

To start, NAT is by far the easiest way to get your guests connected to the interweb, but you may want to use the guests as servers, for this you need Host Networking. You will need to install bridge-utils and uml-utilities so that you can make a tap device and add it to a bridge.

sudo apt-get install bridge-utils uml-utilities

Now make a bridge, and put your current interface into it:

sudo tunctl -t tap1 -u fred #where fred is the user you will be running vbox as 
sudo chown root.vboxusers /dev/net/tun
sudo chmod g+rw /dev/net/tun

Set the permission to persist across reboots, by editing as root /etc/udev/rules.d/20-names.rules and changing:

KERNEL=="tun",                          NAME="net/%k"

KERNEL=="tun",                          NAME="net/%k",  GROUP="vboxusers",     MODE="0660"

Make a new bridge called br0:

sudo brctl addbr br0

Put your current interface (in this case eth0) into promiscuous mode, then add it to the bridge and give the bridge a dhcp address.

sudo ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 promisc 
sudo brctl addif br0 eth0

If you are using DHCP to automatically get an IP address, set the bridge to use DHCP.

sudo dhclient br0

If you are using a static IP, specify the IP address, netmask and add the default gateway route

#Where 192.168.1.105 is your static IP and 255.255.0.0 is your netmask 
sudo ifconfig br0 192.168.1.105 netmask 255.255.0.0

#Where 192.168.1.1 is your default gateway
sudo route add default gw 192.168.1.1 br0

Add the new tap1 device to the bridge and activate tap1 (the second line appears to be necessary according to [WWW] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=561461#3)

sudo brctl addif br0 tap1 
sudo ifconfig tap1 up

You should now be able to use host networking in vbox, just change "attached to" to "host interface" and add the interface name of tap1 in your networking settings. Read the manual as well, there are some other nifty ways to do this. Do not forget to use the root account when doing this. Also reboot your computer afterwords.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox

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