Can't ping machine after installing virtual box

I installed Virtual box V3.2 on a machine. Now I cannot ping that machine from another computer on the network. I have confirmed that the IP address of the machine is same.

I can browse the internet and access other machines on the network, from the machine on which I installed virtual box.

Any idea why this could be happening?

Solution 1:

If you are trying to ping the Guest OS and you are using NAT for networking, it might not always work. It was a limitation of ICMP protocol traffic in NAT mode for VirtualBox.

NAT in VirtualBox does have these limitations (per the User Manual):

There are four limitations of NAT mode which users should be aware of:

ICMP protocol limitations: Some frequently used network debugging tools (e.g. ping or tracerouting) rely on the ICMP protocol for sending/receiving messages. While ICMP support has been improved with VirtualBox 2.1 (ping should now work), some other tools may not work reliably.

Receiving of UDP broadcasts is not reliable: The guest does not reliably receive broadcasts, since, in order to save resources, it only listens for a certain amount of time after the guest has sent UDP data on a particular port. As a consequence, NetBios name resolution based on broadcasts does not always work (but WINS always works). As a workaround, you can use the numeric IP of the desired server in the \server\share notation.

Protocols such as GRE are unsupported: Protocols other than TCP and UDP are not supported. This means some VPN products (e.g. PPTP from Microsoft) cannot be used. There are other VPN products which use simply TCP and UDP.

Forwarding host ports lower than 1024 impossible: On Unix-based hosts (e.g. Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X) it is not possible to bind to ports below 1024 from applications that are not run by root. As a result, if you try to configure such a port forwarding, the VM will refuse to start.