They are Branded as Windows

They are branded as Windows -- in fact, they have been for years. But this is how you know, it's just holes in the wall.

Problem Connecting an XP VBox to WHS

The Acer EasyStore AH340 is a nice little headless box running Windows Home Server. It has 4 SATA hard drive bays, a gigabit Ethernet, a few USB ports and an expansion slot. With an Intel Atom CPU, it is obviously not a power computer. But it serves the purpose of backing up home PCs well. But the bad news is that Acer has discontinued the product line.

Anyway, my AH340 currently is backing up a Windows XP laptop from work. But I am having much trouble trying to connect an XP virtual machine running in Oracle VirtualBox inside my Ubuntu desktop.

After connecting from the VBox to HTTP port 55000 on the AH340, I downloaded the WHSConnectorInstall.exe software. Starts it. It goes looking for the server on the network:

It seems to find it OK and start to download software:

But that's as far as it gets:

There isn't really much help in troubleshooting. I searched online but did not find anyone else with the exact same problem.

Wireshark came to the rescue. It turns out that the WHS connector installer program changes the Windows hosts file after it finds the home server. Because the XP VM network adaptor is configured in NAT mode, the home server's address is translated to 10.0.0.2 by VirtualBox.

After changing the VM's network interface to Bridged mode, everything works.