VirtualBox 5 Host Only Error Failed to Attach the Network LUN

Just today I encountered an annoying error when I started my Vagrant boxes today. I thought my box was corrupted and thus I tried re-provisioning a couple times. This does not help at all.

The errors that I was having was “HostInterfaceNetworking-VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter #3 Failed to attach the network LUN”.

Looking at that kind of errors, I thought it was something to do with my VirtualBox network device being wiped out by the coincidentally recent Windows 10 update. Therefore I double-checked under my Device Manager and found that the adapter is listed under the network adapters list, so there should be no problem there.

Just to be extra sure, I also deleted the Host Only network adapter from the VirtualBox preference screen and re-create new host only network adapters. That didn’t help. In the end I tried uninstalling and re-installing VirtualBox itself and still no luck.

This problem was very frustrating as it’s quite ambiguous. The errors displayed in the command line were even worst than when I tried to run the Vagrant provisioned virtual machine manually.

Here’s what the console error looked like by the way:

Yep, the above errors were not really friendly. Anyway, I found the solutions to this issue from one of the threads in VirtualBox forum.

Solution

Apperently there are some some issues with NDIS6 driver in Windows 10, I don’t know the details as well however there are a whole bunch of discussions with this breaking virtual machines network.

Uninstalling then re-installing VirtualBox with the parameter NETWORKTYPE=NDIS5 fixed this teething issue for me.

1. Open PowerShell command line
2. Navigate to the directory where you download VirtualBox 5 installer
3. Run: .\VirtualBox-5.0.10-104601-Win.exe -msiparams NETWORKTYPE=NDIS5
4. Follow the installations as usual
5. Try to re-run vagrant up and it’ll be all good.

Categorised in: Software Development