Recent Issues with VMWare/Virtualbox Bridged Connectivity

Background

In a recent update to Windows 10, I lost connectivity via Bridged mode with ALL of my virtual machine guests, both on VMWare and Virtualbox.  Oddly, I was able to pull an inet6 address, but would have no IPv4 connectivity whatsoever.  For the better part of a week I have tried to find a solution to this issue, from rebuilding virtual networks to creating virtual bridged adapters between VM Ethernet connections.  No matter what I did, nothing would seem to work.  DHCP appeared to be working as I was able to add new devices to the network and receive IP address information, so I was certain that it was working properly as well.

I had finally submitted to the fact that I would be stuck in NAT mode, unable to communicate with the other machines on my network, and vice versa.  I like to do some work from my Kali Pi4 in to my vulnerable virtual machines for proof of concept work, and it's been a shame to be unable to.

Solution 1 - Hard Way

While continuing to bang my head against the wall this morning, I decided to throw a hail mary and create a static IP address in my network on my Kali guest machine.  I figured I had nothing to lose, so ran with it.

I ran the following and checked ifconfig to see the results. 

ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.128 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

 

As expected, I had assigned the IPv4 address the eth0. However, when I ran a ping to Google, I got nothing back.  

 

This was the same message I had grown accustomed to, but decided to give it one more shot, this time pinging my Raspberry Pi4.  And then my jaw dropped. 

I was able to get out to another machine via Bridged.  I ran a quick ping scan back from the Pi4 to ensure it worked, and it did!  I tried pinging www.google.com, which returned back a "Temporary Failure in name resolution," so I got to work on creating a DNS entry for the machine to resolve names. 

 

I pinged my gateway and got a response back, but was still unable to access the outside network.  Running the "route" command revealed I had no routing table available beyond the interface I have with the host PC. 

 

 I got to work rebuilding the routing table, and did the following

• route add default gw 192.168.1.254

 

I was now able to get out of my home network, and successfully reach the outside world. 

 

Great success!  I finally figured it out.

Solution #2 - Dhclient -v

I had no idea about this little gem, and only discovered it after the fact.  Dhclient is the DHCP client for Linux, and had I thought it had been a DHCP to begin with, I would have tried it.  After sorting things out on my VMWare machine first, I went to my Kali machine on Virtualbox and did the same thing.  I now have Bridged network connectivity on Kali in Virutalbox as well.

Solution #1.5 & 2.5

It should be noted that a static IP address will need to be created in order for bridged mode to function properly.  Do this by editing the following:

Conclusion

We need to keep in mind that updates oftentimes have unintended consequences that can change the way we do things.  I've primarily wrote this blog for my own reference, and in hopes that it may help others who are experiencing the same thing after the recent updates.

Cheers!