Updating to Windows 10 with Virtual Box? You might need to reinstall Virtual Box

On one of my separate dev servers I figured it was as good of a time as any to upgrade to Windows 10.  It was a seamless update, kudos to Microsoft, but when I started up Virtual Box instance running on it, my network adapters were throwing strange errors.  I won’t bore you with the details, I just expected it to work and escape the wrath of Microsoft’s omnipotent presence.

I actually uninstalled Virtual Box the reinstalled it, enough angry web developers out there said this fixed it.  It didn’t.  Then I had to fanangle the /etc/network/interfaces file AND the network adapter settings on each VM to get to work properly again.  Who’s to say it wasn’t the firewall on the Windows server and why am I running Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS VMs on Windows 10, you might ask?  Because those are the flavors I encounter most on live sites, so I like to set up as close of an environment I will encounter on my host and Virtual Box has been so reliable to deploy a new virtual server in less than 20 minutes with everything you need — MySQL, Apache, PHP, and all the PHP libraries, Virtualmin, and Webmin all ready to go.

So for documentation purposes, if you upgrade to Windows 10 and expect Virtual Box to keep humming, you may run into a few hiccups, it took me over an hour to get it to be visible on my LAN and accessible again so I could dev locally.  I remember back in 2005 devving sites on remote servers thinking how slow it was, not devving your site locally first is like pushing a race car instead of driving it — without using your hands!  Oh well, I’m not the strongest server admin, I’m more about the software and systems, so here are my latest settings that got VB and all VMs to work.

Below, you will see how I have 3 servers on different local IP addresses, each with a different web project.  Here are all the main settings that are easy enough to duplicate if needed!  Bridged Adapter is key, but I was reminded that it must still be the second adapter, not the first.  Why?  Good question, perhaps someone with more technical knowledge could enlighten us all?!  Any insight would be appreciated!

Latest VM VirtualBox network interfaces adapter setting 1 Latest VM VirtualBox network interfaces adapter setting 2 Latest VM VirtualBox network interfaces adapter setting 3

 

Here’s the cat /etc/network/interfaces:  Latest VM VirtualBox network interfaces file configuration

About Author:

Senior Cloud Software Engineer and 25+ years experienced video production, video editing and 3D animation services for a variety of global clients including local video production here in Jacksonville, Florida.

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