PIA Client No Longer Works With VirtualBox

priv6100priv6100
in General VPN Support
Hi!

Love the product ( and the support - I had some trouble awhile ago and was helped above & beyond expectation!)!

First: To clarify - the discussion title is a bit misleading but I didn't want to get to wordy. The scenario is actually this:

I have been using the PIA client for Windows on a Win 7 desktop (not sure of the build #, "properties" isn't telling but the file was last modified in January of last year. File size: 7.35 MB.) without issue fo a year, which has a wired connection to a home router. I've also been running VirtualBox on this box, and instead of installing the PIA client on the various guest OSs, I found that I could successfully just make sure that the virtual adapters were set to bridge mode, and that way the guest OSs would use the one PIA client running on the host (Win 7) machine.

This no longer works.

For example, on a Linux VM, my real IP is shown when using Firefox, Hex Chat (IRC), and the command line.

According to a website (that I can unfortunately not remember the URL of), I am not leaking IPv6.

I'm not sure where anyone would begin to trouble-shoot this, and this scenario might very well qualify as out-of-warranty but any ideas (you know...the ones I haven't thought of already ;)  ).

thanks waaaaay in advance,

priv

Comments

  • priv6100priv6100
    Just wanted to add that my home router is still giving my VMs a local IP via DHCP. That didn't happen before. The only way the router would do that before was if I set the VM's virtual interface to NAT.

    I tried disabling both settings under the IPv6 tab in the router. All my traffic is using IPv4 addressing now (which I don't mind) but it's had no effect.

    Under the VM's virtual network interface settings, besides setting it to NAT, Bridge etc., there is another setting to choose what interface it will connect to. I had always just left it to the default, which is my physical Gigabit card.and it always worked.

    I tried setting it to the TAP adapter and it wouldn't connect.
  • priv6100priv6100
    Over an hour later, I've tried a million more things, until finally I tried the thing that I'd *never* try - NAT.

    I works.

    Now, set on NAT, the VMs are *not* given a local IP by the router (which would be 192.168.*.*), but instead VirtualBox is making it's own VPN (10.0.*.*) and it's connecting to the PIA client running on the host.

    Completely backwards from the way it worked before.

    I can't have been mistaken - I've got thousands of hours logged doing this stuff....

    Still wouldn't mind some comments (any that would support the argument that I'm not losing my mind ;)  )

    Sorry for anyone who feels they wasted their time reading this tome!

    Thanks,
    priv

  • Max-PMax-P
    Hello there!

    Yes, NAT is definitely the option you want. You may have been confused before or simply remembered backwards.

    Essentially, if your router was giving your VM an IP address directly, that means that the VM is talking directly to the network and is thus bypassing your host computer. This is usually called "bridged" networking, and this is why it also let you specify a network interface to bridge to: it's the network interface it's going to plug the virtual adapter to. Your VM talks directly to the router 

    When set to NAT, VirtualBox becomes the VM's router and since it uses your host computer's network connection, if PIA is running it uses that.

    I hope it helps you better understand what was going on :)
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