Fixing NAT for Virtual Box on Ubuntu

For some reason, NAT quit working for me in Virtual Box.  Everything works fine, but the machines won’t connect to the Internet unless I change them to bind to a particular adapter.  The problem is that I use different adapters based on my location.  At the office, I have a docking station and the network goes through the USB connector.  At home, I use wireless.  So, when I bind, I have to remember to change the adapter for it to work.  If I use NAT, it doesn’t matter.

So, here’s how I found I could fix NAT to work again.

Listing the VMs

First, I need the exact name of images. This will make a nice list of the images:

vboxmanage list vms

Or, this list will also show the network settings.

vboxmanage list --long vms | grep -i '^name:\|^nic [1234567890]*:' | grep -iv disabled

Fixing the NAT

So, let’s assume that my virtual machine is called “My Virtual Machine”.  Here’s the command that I found that does the trick:

vboxmanage modifyvm "My Virtual Machine" --natdnshostresolver1 on

Or, I found that I could switch it to NAT from the command-line at the same time:

skp@chestnut:~$ vboxmanage modifyvm "My Virtual Machine" --nic1 nat
skp@chestnut:~$ vboxmanage modifyvm "My Virtual Machine" --natdnshostresolver1 on

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