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When logged into the guest, data transfer (scp) from the host is very slow (<1MB/s). Is this expected?

setup:

  • VirtualBox host is Debian Unstable
  • VirtualBox guest is Debian 6 (Squeeze)
  • Bridged Adapter is wlan0
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What happens if you tell VirtualBox to bridge to eth0 instead? – Warren Young Jul 18 at 4:07
I am on a wireless network, so suing eth0 won't even give the guest an IP address. – Tshepang Jul 18 at 11:36
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I figured so. I just wanted you to try it to see if it's much faster. Given bahamat's answer, I expect it will be, by more than the factor difference between the network speeds. That is, if you have a 108 Mbit/s wireless connection (802.11n) and a GigE wired connection, I think you'll see much more than a 10x increase by going wired. That would confirm bahamat's answer, which sounds right to me. Wireless is a bit of a different game from wired, so the 1-MAC limit is plausible. – Warren Young Jul 18 at 13:47
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up vote 5 down vote

It's not just you.

See here: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Bridge#Limitations

Basically, the spec for WiFi says that any wireless adapter can only have one MAC address, which makes bridging WiFi an impracticality.

There are several bugs in several forms describing slightly different symptoms filed against VirtualBox (735, 2975, 5503, etc.) but the underlying cause in each case is bridging a wireless interface.

I have ended up adding host-only interfaces for this kind of activity instead.

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