Question

I have a Ubuntu VM running on my Windows 7 machine. How do I set it up so that I can access the webserver externally through SSH?

I found steps (Setup SSH access between VirtualBox Host and Guest VMs) to be able to ssh to my guest from my host, but that still leaves me with the problem of accessing it through my router.

I suppose that I could install an SSH server on my Windows machine and then tunnel a few times (though I’m not 100% sure what to use in terms of local, dynamic, etc. or how to set up multiple tunnels?), but is there a way to make the VM directly accessible to my router so I could directly port forward to it?

Answer 1

The best way to login to a guest Linux VirtualBox VM is port forwarding. By default, you should have one interface already which is using NAT. Then go to the Network settings and click the Port Forwarding button. Add a new Rule. As the rule name, insert “ssh”. As “Host port”, insert 3022. As “Guest port”, insert 22. Everything else of the rule can be left blank.

or from the command line

VBoxManage modifyvm myserver --natpf1 "ssh,tcp,,3022,,22"

where ‘myserver’ is the name of the created VM. Check the added rules:

VBoxManage showvminfo myserver | grep 'Rule'

That’s all! Please be sure you don’t forget to install an SSH server in the VM:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

To SSH into the guest VM, write:

ssh -p 3022 user@127.0.0.1

Where user is your username within the VM.