Hyper V - Access to the host computer

This was not as easy as I would have imagined, intuitively it should have been easier to accomplish than internet access, but for some reason it was not.

Finally I managed to solve it, by opening these ports on windows firewall, then I just used the default created switch in Hyper V. Who knows, this might even allow the client OSs to access the internet through the host.

 Hyper - v virtual machine // internet access

While I am not an expert, I still cannot understand why the default network (Virtual Switch) is internal and not external. I could not get to the internet through the internal even though it is supposed to do NAT.

The easy solution, without a lot of abrakadabra, is to create another virtual switch, which is external, and use that instead to connect the virtual machine's network interface card.

And unless you are one of those abrakadabra writing masters of powershell, the GUI should be suitable for your needs.

1. Open Hyper V Manager
2. Go to Virtual Switch Manager
3. Create a (new) virtual switch, it does not matter what you select here as...
4. You will have to select the type in the next window, select the external network interface through which you have internet access (as this is the whole point of this little hint blog).
5. Name it something that is wise or not, you can call it Bravado or whatever.
6. Apply and save it.
7. Open the settings page for your virtual machine, probably a linux beast, and choose your network to be connected to the newly created virtual switch.

Good luck.

ps.

When you will find yourselves on a hotel with some kind of internet access restriction, which would block two MAC addresses (this is what happens if you use the above technique) I devised a trick to avoid this.

The host is connected with one network interface, in this case the wireless, on windows I would then go through with the registration process via a browser.

The client was instead wired to the hotel's network, and inside the client the registration process was carried out.

Virtual Box - Alternative way to install windows 95 (and 98) when MSCDEX is missing and thus optical drive (or when the installation halts in Win 98)

Problem

My original Win 95 floppy disk did not include the optical driver, so I could not load the CD disc. A fake ISO disc did not work either for obvious reasons. But in order to access the files they need to be copied over to a drive.

Solution

The virtual drives that are created by Virtual Box can be mounted in for example win 10. There are a few methods of creating a virtual drive, the one I found that is mountable in win 10 is the Virtual Hard Disk (.vhd) format.

Create such a virtual hard disk. It is probably possible to partition and format this through windows 10, however through the start floppy disk, the fdisk and format tools are available, so this was my choice. It takes a long time to boot from a floppy, but it is also very nostalgic.

Finally, when the virtual drive has been partioned and formatted, use windows 10 Computer Management tool (Compmgmt.msc) and attach virtual drive. As this disk is now both properly partioned and formatted it will be mounted and assigned a drive letter.

Open file explorer and copy the whole optical disc content to the virtual drive.

Re-start the virtual windows 95 or 98, and continue from the drive to where you copied the disc's data to.

This also helps avoid the annoying issue of halting installation in Windows 98, if it is attempted to be done straight from the optical driva.