I develop rails in ubuntu and i just set up a virtualbox windows xp virtual machine for IE testing. I'd like to be able to run mongrel_rails in ubuntu and then jump into the vm to check it out, so i can jump back, make a change, jump into the vm again, reload the page and test it, etc. Is this possible?

In this sort of situation in the past i've had to set up an apache server on my dev machine and run mongrel under that, in order to get an externally visible (ie visible to my local network) ip address that i then paste into the address bar of IE in the vm. Is this really necessary? Is there a simpler way? Can i do something with my /etc/hosts or sites-available files to just make up some arbitrary network address which points to localhost:3000 in ubuntu? Or something?

thanks, max