Bug 501476 – app-emulation/virtualbox-bin expects /sbin/ifconfig

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description bacce 2014-02-16 12:24:11 UTC]

In VirtualBox it is possible to configure several different types of interfaces for VMs , one of which is the 'host-only' adapter. This adapter type allows the establishment of a network layer-3 connection exclusively between the host-system and the VM.

When a VM with such an interface is started, VirtualBox puts up a new virtual interface on the host-system, called 'vboxnet0' and adds an IP address as configured. For this VirtualBox expects /sbin/ifconfig, which was recently moved by gentoo-devs to /bin/ifconfig.

When /sbin/ifconfig is not present, VirtualBox seems to silently ignore this error and boot the machine without ifup'ing the interface on the host-side. This leads to a broken host-only connection, as there is not receiving interface on the host-system.

Quick-fix:
# ln -s /bin/ifconfig /sbin/ifconfig    # and then reboot VMs with host-only adapter!

[Comment 1 Lars Wendler (Polynomial-C) (RETIRED) 2014-02-16 15:12:22 UTC]

See bug #455902#c7 for a reason why we cannot fix this.
Please report this problem to upstream. maybe they can be convinced to fix this in their binary packages.

[Comment 2 Fabio Rossi 2014-02-17 22:28:45 UTC]

I have just opened this ticket upstream:

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12713

[Comment 3 Lars Wendler (Polynomial-C) (RETIRED) 2014-02-18 08:17:58 UTC]

(In reply to Fabio Rossi from comment #2)
> I have just opened this ticket upstream:
> 
> https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12713

Thank you very much :)

[Comment 4 Lars Wendler (Polynomial-C) (RETIRED) 2014-03-06 10:52:10 UTC]

Fixed in virtualbox-bin-4.3.8