The question of how to establish a connection into a NAT-mode vbox (and the answer "you can't") seems to have come up a few times here.
I'd suggest that those who long to ssh, ping, http and VNC their way into their NAT-mode VBoxes, but who like me are scared off by the apparent complexity of the bridging setup described in the VBox docs, take a look at OpenVPN instead. The below (adapted from howto at http://openvpn.net/static.html ) works nicely for a Debian Etch host at 192.168.7.3 running a Debian Etch guest in a NAT-mode VBox: As root on host: apt-get install openvpn echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward cd /etc/openvpn openvpn --genkey --secret vboxvpn.key cat<<EOF > debianvm.conf dev tun ifconfig 10.8.0.1 10.8.0.2 secret vboxvpn.key keepalive 10 60 EOF openvpn debianvm.conf As root on guest: apt-get install ssh openvpn cd /etc/openvpn scp [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/etc/openvpn/vboxvpn.key . cat<<EOF > debianvm.conf remote 192.168.7.3 dev tun ifconfig 10.8.0.2 10.8.0.1 secret vboxvpn.key keepalive 10 60 EOF openvpn debianvm.conf Both openvpns should spew some stuff ending with "Peer connection initiated... initialization sequence completed". As user on host: ping 10.8.0.2 ...responds... ssh -l root 10.8.0.2 ...and you're in; enjoy... [There's nothing special about ssh; e.g a host-side xtightvncviewer connecting in to a tightvncserver running on the guest works fine too]. Niceties like automatic startup of openvpn, local routing to the VPN subnet, updating /etc/hosts entries, dealing with multiple VBoxes etc are left as an exercise. OpenVPN should cope well with guests actually being moved around host machines: so long as the above guest has routing to the OpenVPN server at 192.168.7.3 it should always be possible to connect into the guest via 10.8.0.2 regardless of the host's IP or the address assigned the to the guest's eth0 by the NAT VBox DHCP. Have fun Tim _______________________________________________ vbox-users mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
