Re: virt-manager and qemu: virtual networking missing

[john doe <johndoe65534@mail.com>]

On 10/27/25 6:39 PM, Charles Curley wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Oct 2025 13:17:00 -0600
> Charles Curley <charlescurley@charlescurley.com> wrote:
>
>
> As near as I can tell the problem with using wifi isn't wifi per se.
> Apparently some wifi routers track MAC addresses. Your computer gets on
> the network using its MAC address. Your virtual machines have
> different MAC addresses. Linux's virtual networking is transparent,
> meaning it does not play with the virtual machines' MAC addresses. So
> the wifi router sees this new MAC address from the VM, and rejects it.
> Apparently my wifi access points do not care about this, as I have run
> VMs on laptops on my home network for years without issue. And there are
> solutions out there based on ebtables.

The default network for virbr0 does that automatically but if you change 
"nat" to "open" you could do everything yourself!

If you use network address translation  the guest(s) will not be seen by 
the upstream router but if you bridge an ethernet interface as br0 guest 
will be seen as a new MAC by the upstream DHCP server.

> I am considering filing a bug. I believe the libvirt folks should solve
> this problem, not Debian packagers.

Before filing a bug, I would go on the Libvirt mailing list to see if 
you get more input on what's going on.

--
John Doe