Ping Guest OS from Host OS with VirtualBox

I am running a host Windows 7 machine with a Guest Windows Server 2008 RC2. The guest machine is hosted inside of VirtualBox. It appears that this issue can occur with any number of OS host or guest machines.

From the guest machine I could access the internet and access the host machine, but I could not ping or access the guest machine from the host. Turns out there is a network setting that needs to be changed.

On the guests 'container' go to Devices > Network Adapters

Then change 'Attached to' from 'NAT' to 'Bridged Adapter'

at that point you should be good to go

Resources

• virtualbox forums: Host can't ping guest in Different OS ??

Remote desktop mac OSX to Ubuntu

There is a good program (free) for remote connections between mac OSX and Ubuntu. It is called Chicken of the VNC - in my case I needed to remote into an Ubuntu (9.04) desktop from my mac.

First step - allow remote access on the Ubuntu machine

Install Chicken of the VNC

• download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/
• install the dmg file
• then drag the Chicken into your Applications folder

Then open the program and type in the IP address of the machine you wish to connect to.
Done - you are now remoted!

VirutalBox - Increase the memory on an existing guest machine

I use VirtualBox to run a guest Windows XP machine on my Mac. When I set up the virtual guest I set it to use 512MB of memory. And of course now I decide I want to bump it to 1GB. I could not find anyway to do this using the GUI but it can be done from the Terminal.

When the virtual machine is not running execute this command

VBoxManage modifyvm XP1 --memory 1024

XP1 is the name of my guest machine, so replace with yours. The memory parameter takes the amount in MB, in this case 1GB

The first time I ran it I received the following error message

ERROR: The machine is not mutable (state is Saved)

Last time I turned off the guest machine I had selected the save state option. You need to Power the virtual machine down before you can run this command.