This Is Your Brain On Informatics: Network

Possibly the most important aspect to computers: the internet (or more broadly, the network). Here are some guidelines to setting up networks on Linux machines with special sections for the virtual machine controlled by VirtualBox.

Getting Started

This first item of note is the location of the file that names the network connections in Linux. This file can be found here under the network section. Upon being opened the file should show something similar to this (# indicates a comment):

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

The networks shown here are the basic networks that will allow the machine to connect to the internet. If this is a regular computer (not a virtual machine), this file should be completely setup for internet connection and ssh purposes.

Adding a network

This step should be taken care of if it is a regular computer; however this is very necessary for a virtual machine.

Using a Dynamically Acquired IP

This method will the network to randomly (within reason of course) select an IP address each time the virtual box is disconnected from an ISP (Internet Service Provider) or another virtual machine is created.

Vitual Machine Note
This step is critical to allowing the virtual machine to interact with the outside world and not have a host only network. The steps below are for a virtual box, but can be applied to any other network setup in Linux.

1. Access the above pathname with pico (pico /etc/network/interfaces)
2. Below the first network (indicated by eth0), copy the first network, replacing eth0 with eth1

   auto eth1

   iface eth1 inet dhcp

3. Reboot the machine
4. Determine the new IP address of the eth1 network by one of the following
   1. After logging in, check the IP next to the eth1 network
   2. Type "ifconfig" into the command line and check the IP next to the "inet addr:"