VirtualBox Port Fowarding to Connect to PostgreSQL Database

Question

I'm trying to connect to a PostgreSQL database hosted on a Win7 guest from a Win7 host.

I've configured security in pg_hba.conf

host all all 127.0.0.1/32 md5 host all all 10.0.2.15/32 md5 host all all 192.168.1.6/32 md5 

and set the listen_addresses setting in postgresql.conf to '*'.

I think I've set up port forwarding correctly as I see:

Key: VBoxInternal/Devices/e1000/0/LUN#0/Config/win7_vm1/GuestPort, Value: 5432 Key: VBoxInternal/Devices/e1000/0/LUN#0/Config/win7_vm1/HostPort, Value: 5432 Key: VBoxInternal/Devices/e1000/0/LUN#0/Config/win7_vm1/Protocol, Value: TCP 

when I call getextradata.

This is similar to Can't connect to PostgreSQL on VirtualBox guest but I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

In the vbox.log file I see:

00:00:01.019 NAT: set redirect TCP host port 5432 => guest port 5432 @ 10.0.2.15 00:00:01.033 NAT: failed to redirect TCP 5432 => 5432

but I'm not sure how to fix that. Any ideas? Thanks.

Answer 1

My first question would be, can you verify that you can connect to PostgreSQL on the guest from the guest?

As for the issue with the port forwarding failure, that is typically the result of VirtualBox not being able to create a socket listening for connections on the host - and the most common cause for that is that something else is already listening on that port. Do you have a PostgreSQL running on the host as well?

Take a look at the TCPView tool from the SysInternals team at Microsoft. It can show you active TCP endpoints and their owning process. This should help you determine if something has grabbed TCP 5432 and what it is. Run it on the host - and guest if you want to verify PostgreSQL is running and listening for connections.

TCPView: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897437

Answer 2

If the database is hosted on the host, then no port forwarding should be needed, just point the guest to the NAT host (identified via ipconfig).