tuntap hacks for FreeBSD vbox hosts (bandaid till vbox-net driver...)

[Sean C. Farley]

On Wed, 19 Aug 2009, Juergen Lock wrote:

> Hi!
>
> After inquiring on the #vbox-dev channel whether the tuntap code could 
> be resurrected for hosts that don't have vbox net/bridge drivers yet 
> (like FreeBSD :) I now got it working - except the config gui and 
> ifup/down scripts, the code for at least the latter seems to have been 
> ripped out for good indeed...  So for now you have to use VBoxManage 
> something like this,
> 	VBoxManage modifyvm <VM name> --nic1 bridged --bridgeadapter1 tap0
> and manually configure your tap interface and (optionally) add it to a 
> bridge before the VM starts.  If you already have setup your host 
> system to use tuntap networking with qemu you probably can just 
> chown/chmod /dev/tap0 (or whichever one you use) to 660 root:vboxusers 
> and then run your /usr/local/etc/qemu-ifup script with the same tap 
> interface as arg, otherwise do something like...
> 	kldload if_tap if_bridge
> 	sysctl net.link.tap.user_open=1
> 	chown root:vboxusers /dev/tap0
> 	chmod 660 /dev/tap0
> 	ifconfig bridge0 create
> 	ifconfig bridge0 addm <host physical interface>
> 	ifconfig tap0 <ip> netmask <netmask>
> 	ifconfig bridge0 addm tap0
> and then start the guest.  (You'll have to rerun the `ifconfig tap0 
> ...' each time before you start the guest again.)

Thank you!  I had started looking at the code to try to figure out why I 
could not force the use of a tap device via VBoxManage.  This patch 
works for me with FreeBSD 7-STABLE.

BTW, you should not need the ifconfig tap0 line above since the VM is 
getting or setting its own IP.  Is there a reason to do it?

If you want it to have it look even more authenticate, you can always 
rename the tap device to vboxnet0 with ifconfig.  :)

Sean
-- 
scf at FreeBSD.org