Linux – Debian guest on VirtualBox with bridged adapter has no internet access

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I have setup a Debian guest and I am messing around with it to learn more about VirtualBox, Debian, and later after that is done I'll be messing around with a NodeJS server on it.

After a while I noticed I couldn't do some things with it when I had a Bridged adapter setup for the VM. NPM would not install packages because it timed out. I tried running "w3m google.com" and even looked up google.com's ip to check for a DNS issue.

No matter what, I cannot connect to any form of internet. But I can ping anything just fine. I can ping google, npmjs.org, etc.

Thanks for the assistance.

Update: I have been working on this more today, Newer router, asus, I read that people were having issues with belkin routers with bridged adapters so I switched, the asus is new anyways.

The host is connected via ethernet wire.
The VM shows up on the router just fine, And I connect to that device with the IP given by the router just fine. but I still cannot connect to google.com or anything.

Best Answer

This is too long to explain in a comment. Below is how the bridged adapter works.

Yet, if you can ping from the guest debian that means some form of DHCP happened and you must have and IP (which is a different IP from the host machine). I'd check router configuration to see if you're not allowing/disallowing specific MACs and/or IPs from the usage of TCP/UDP protocols (that is a measure some people use on their routers).

Bridged adapter

A bridged adapter on VirtualBox simulates as if there was a bridge (well it is easier to think of this as a hub) on the cable connection to your (host) actual machine. Even if the connection is over wireless the simulation is similar.

For (almost) all purposes the guest (debian) and the router the host machine is connected to are connected directly. Have separate MAC, separate IP, they even give separate ARP requests.

router <---> host machine running VirtualBox
  ^
  |
  +-----> guest machine running Debian

This is done by sending packets with a different hardware address (you can configure the hardware address in the adapter).

You need to configure the guest system (Debian) to connect to the network as if it was a separate machine. For example, if you use a WPA connection from the host machine you need to configure WPA (including the username and password) in the guest machine.

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