Question

I’m trying to set up what I believe to be a rather common Django development server configuration, but I’m having issues with the port-forwarding between the guest OS and the host OS.

I’m running:

• Win7 Host
• VirtualBox 4.1.2
• Ubuntu Server 11.04 Guest.

I’m connecting to the VirtualBox with NAT and using the built-in VirtualBox Port Forwarding functionality (from the guest’s Settings -> Network -> Port Forwarding menu) such that my .vbox XML contains the following section:

<NAT>
        <DNS pass-domain="true" use-proxy="false" use-host-resolver="false"/>
        <Alias logging="false" proxy-only="false" use-same-ports="false"/>
        <Forwarding name="guestdjango" proto="1" hostip="127.0.0.2" hostport="9080" guestport="8080"/>
        <Forwarding name="guesthttp" proto="1" hostip="127.0.0.2" hostport="8080" guestport="80"/>
        <Forwarding name="guestssh" proto="1" hostip="127.0.0.2" hostport="2222" guestport="22"/>
</NAT>

From the host, I can SSH/SFTP into the guest on port 2222, I can see the nginx “Welcome to nginx!” at 127.0.0.2:8080.

After verifying these, I set up Django and run the Django runsever:

python manage.py runserver 127.0.0.1:8080

With Lynx from the guest, I get the “Congratulations” Django page at 127.0.0.1:8080.

However, when I navigate to 127.0.0.2:9080 from the host, I get “The connection was reset.”

Answer 1

I’m not completely sure how it works with port forwarding, but normally to expose the runserver to the external network you need to bind it to something other than localhost – ie run python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8080. See if that works.