Maximise the power of VirtualBox networking

Stuart Burns builds upon the powerful components of advanced VirtualBox networking with this second instalment of stress-saving tips.

- Stuart Burns

QUICK TIP

PfSense has many more goodies hidden away, ready to install. Useful examples include snort, syslog or NMAP. These tools aka “packages” can be found under x and y. Select them and they will install themselves. Exercise caution, as some may require significant resources.

Last month we covered how to build an isolated but internet-capable test network for experimentation with no risk of breaking your network. Assuming that everything is working as expected, this month we’ll build on what was created in the last issue (see https://bit.ly/lxf280network). We’ll create a more complex network environment incorporating additional virtual networks and add additional physical hosts within the internal-only environment that comes with VirtualBox.

It can be useful to have more than one test network, given that Linux users like to experiment with multiple technologies or even mimic a larger, more complex network. The networks can either be isolated or joined to the existing infrastructure.

By default, VirtualBox has only one internal-only “intnet” network to select out of the box. For this tutorial’s purposes we require an additional network. Fortunately, it’s straightforward to add additional host-based virtual networks to the VirtualBox environment.