Virtuosity

Today was a good day. I successfully got both WinXP and OpenSolaris 2008.05 running, and talking, under the recently released VirtualBox 1.6 on my (Intel based) MacBook Pro. I had installed both OSes earlier in the week and was pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and overall performance but was having trouble getting both XP and OpenSolaris to "talk" on my home network and to the Internet via my Linksys (WRT54G) Broadband Router. Btw, I still can't believe the VirtualBox 1.6 .dmg file is only 26.3MB.

So, it turns out that for some reason the default DNS IP address (10.0.2.3) provided by VirtualBox internal DHCP server was not properly resolving names for me. I'm still not sure why this doesn't work out of the box (stay tuned for a follow-up entry) but what did work was to provide my own DNS server address in /etc/resolv.conf on Solaris and for the emulated AMD NIC interface under XP and DNS started working as expected. Note that since only NAT networking is supported at this time you can't use ping to troubleshoot connectivity. I used telnet and Firefox to test IP communications.

Before I continue I should credit Dana's Weblog entry for helping me to get Solaris talking:

• Running OpenSolaris 2008.05 under VirtualBox on OS X Leopard

From her blog I learned that I needed to use the "Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (NAT)" NIC instead of the default AMD PCnet interface. Once I made the change and restarted the virtual machine, the OpenSolaris Network Auto-Magic Service was successfully able to find and plumb the e1000g interface and life was good.

Here's are screen shots of both my WinXP and OpenSolaris Virtual Machine settings:

WinXP

OpenSolaris