pidgin bonjour on a VM not detecting other bonjour buddies on local lan

Question

I am on a VM (virtualbox) on Windows 7 and trying to use pidgin bonjour to chat on local LAN. But i cant see any of the other bonjour buddies on normal PCs(not on VM) which are on local LAN. I know that a VM does something like virtual LAN setup for accessing the LAN on host m/c... but is there any way i can do bonjour chatting b/w normal pcs and VM??

Thanks.

Answer 1

I solve this with this way:

• I closed the VM.
• In the properties of the VM, I click on the "Network" properties.
• I verify that the Network Card 1 is connected by Bridge and not by NAT.

Start the VM. Pidgin does connect to Bonjour network.

Answer 2

thats because your virtual machine has its own networking interface with an own IP which is mapped (bridged) by the virtual machine to the real networking interface. but for your bonjour client this does not matter, it sees only the internal IP.

and since bonjour searches only in the local net, you can't see the others.

a way to solve this is to use kind of bonjour-proxies like 'avahi':

Ability to reflect mDNS traffic between multiple subnets

that is a bit like the 'wireless router that supports bonjour between wire- and wireless- connected machines' question on superuser.