I am having hard time getting Bridged network to work with VirtualBox. Idea is to have host as well as one or more guests on same LAN.

Using NAT (default) I do get access to internet and any node on the LAN when working from one of the VM guests. However, no LAN node including host can access (or ping) guest in VM.

I need to be able to use any guest as if it was a physical computer on the network (need to be accessed by any machine on LAN). According to my understanding of the VirtualBox documentation, this should be Bridged mode.

I think I set it correctly, well, actually there is not much to it: 1. select Bridged mode in VM network setup 2. select physical NIC of the host to connect bridge to 3. start VM

When I do this, each VM does get new IP address that corresponds to LAN settings : 192.168.1.100 192.168.1.102 192.168.1.103 etc.

where host is 192.168.1.80 / 255.255.255.0 (IP addresses above 100 are served by DHCP server). This seem to be correct based on what I know about ethernet. From VM I can ping other nodes like 192.168.1.50 etc. and I still get ethernet access.

So far so good... But I STILL cannot ping any of the other VMs (running ones of course). I cannot ping them from other VMs, from host or from other nodes on the LAN. Aside from fact that IP addresses handed to guests are now local, this still acts same as NAT.

What is going on? What am I missing?

Regards,

I