Can ping out but not in

That's a bit odd. I wonder if your firewall / router has some ACLs that are only applying to the IP address assigned to the server computer.

I'd try something like:

TELNET www.google.com 80

First and see if you even get a TCP connection. If you get a blank window w/ a blinking cursor, type "GET / HTTP/1.0" (w/o quotes, and it won't echo) and press <ENTER> twice. See if you get back a response.

Set the server computer's IP address to the one that worked on the laptop computer. If it doesn't work, at that point, you'll have ruled out everything except for software on the server computer itself.

Edit: Okay-- I see in your comment on another post that you tried a laptop w/ the same IP that's currently assigned to the server and the laptop worked fine. That does sound like something is up w/ the server computer, then.

How did that TELNET do? That's going to isolate the problem to either the TCP/IP stack or the browser, depending on if the TELNET works or not.

When you open a browser and it's "trying to connect" run a "NETSTAT -a -n" and look for TCP connections outbound to port 80. I'd be interested to see if it's even trying to make an outbound connection or not.

Try this:

1. Setup the virtualbox to use 2 adapters:
   • The first adapter is set to NAT (that will give you the internet connection).
   • The second adapter is set to host only.
2. Start the virtual machine and assign a static IP for the second adapter in Ubuntu (for instance 192.168.56.56). The host Windows will have 192.168.56.1 as IP for the internal network (VirtualBox Host-Only Network is the name in network connections in Windows). What this will give you is being able to access the apache server on ubuntu, from windows, by going to 192.168.56.56. Also, Ubuntu will have internet access, since the first adapter (set to NAT) will take care of that.
3. Now, to make the connection available both ways (accessing the windows host from the ubuntu guest) there's still one more step to be performed. Windows will automatically add the virtualbox host-only network to the list of public networks and that cannot be changed. This entails that the firewall will prevent proper access.
4. To overcome this and not make any security breaches in your setup:
   • go to the windows firewall section, in control panel,
   • click on advanced settings. In the page that pops up,
   • click on inbound rules (left column), then on new rule (right column). Chose custom rule, set the rule to allow all programs, and any protocol. For the scope, add in the first box (local IP addresses) 192.168.56.1, and in the second box (remote IP) 192.168.56.56. Click next, select allow the connection, next, check all profiles, next, give it a name and save.

That's it, now you have 2 way communication, with apache/any other service available as well as internet. The final step is to setup a share. Do not use the shared folders feature in virtualbox, it's quite buggy especially with windows 7 (and 64 bit). Instead use samba shares - fast and efficient.

Follow this link for how to set that up: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently