Virtualbox Savestate and restore does not restore the network
I make extensive use of Virtualbox to test my installations. When I automate the installation , I use the savestate and restore to rollback changes I do to the virtual machine. Recently the network of the virtual machine would not be accessible anymore after the restore. A network ping from both inside or outside the virtualmachine fails. Several tickets have been created for it, and the bug seems to pop up every new update or so Fixed in 25205 , re-introduced in Ticket 5666, Ticket 5654 .
The first work-around I found was:
On a linux machine restart the network stack with a /etc/init.d/network restart . But that is not very portable, and it’s hard to automate because the network is gone.
A more generic work-around is to temporary disable the network link:
$ VBoxManage controlvm <yourvmname> setlinkstate1 off
$ VBoxManage controlvm <yourvmname> setlinkstate1 on
$ sleep 2
NAT: re-establish port-forwarding after savestate / restore state
Another quite annoying bug is that virtualbox sometimes looses it’s NAT mappings Ticket 25402 There is no other way then re-executing the NAT mapping.