PfSense as VirtualBox guest… Host networking issues

talz13

So this is what I'm trying to do:

1. Set up pfSense as a VirtualBox VM running on my Ubuntu server as the FW/Router.
2. Have the pfSense VM be the DHCP server for my home LAN.

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem possible without setting up a static IP / routing on my Ubuntu host. If I have eth0 (the LAN card) set for DHCP, the boot process will hang waiting for network config since the pfSense VM is not up yet. Eventually it moves on, but eth0 is not configured.

I tried setting up eth0 to be a static IP, etc., and that fixed most of the issue. This is how I configured eth0:

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.2
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        gateway 192.168.1.1
        dns-nameservers 192.168.1.1

Where 192.168.1.1 is the LAN address of the pfSense VM.

But when I try to ping from the Ubuntu host to a website, I get:

jeff@server:~$ ping google.com
PING google.com (74.125.228.101) 56(84) bytes of data.
From server.home (192.168.1.2) icmp_seq=1 Destination Port Unreachable
From server.home (192.168.1.2) icmp_seq=2 Destination Port Unreachable
From server.home (192.168.1.2) icmp_seq=3 Destination Port Unreachable
^C
--- google.com ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 0 received, +3 errors, 100% packet loss, time 1999ms

Here's the output of the route command on the Ubuntu host:

jeff@server:~$ route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
default         pfSense.home    0.0.0.0         UG    100    0        0 eth0
192.168.1.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
jeff@server:~$