[Dnsmasq-discuss] Can't make dnsmasq work on a VirtualBox host-only network

Michael Rowe mrowe at mojain.com
Fri Oct 1 06:01:01 BST 2010


On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 11:13 AM, Mike Williams <mdub at dogbiscuit.org> wrote:

> I'm attempting to set up a virtualized "farm" of servers under
> VirtualBox. I'll need to create a bunch of VMs, and I don't want to
> have to manually set their hostname and IP address, so a DHCP solution
> is attractive.

[...]

> I'm running dnsmasq on the (Mac OS X 10.6) host

[...]

> Unfortunately, the guest never sees the DHCPOFFERs, and eventually
> gives up in disgust. It seems like the DHCPOFFER packets aren't making
> it back onto the host-only network (vboxnet0).

FWIW I just tried the same thing with a VMWare Fusion VM (using the
host-only interface vmnet1) and got exactly the same result: dnsmasq
sees the REQUEST and sends an OFFER, but the VM never receives the
OFFER.

Is this something to do with the way these "virtual" network
interfaces are set up by VirtualBox/VMWare?

Interestingly, tcpdump can't seem them either:

    $ sudo ifconfig vmnet1
    vmnet1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    	ether 00:50:56:c0:00:01
    	inet 192.168.106.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.106.255
    $ sudo tcpdump -i vmnet1
    tcpdump: vmnet1: No such device exists

And yet, dnsmasq can at least *receive* packets from that interface,
because it sees the DHCPREQUESTs coming in... :-S

-- 
Michael Rowe



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