Genymotion resets VirtualBox networking to “Host-only Ethernet Adapter”

Blindly using vboxnet0 as your interface name will not work for everyone, or even most people.

1. Use ifconfig to get a list of your network adapters.

2. On my machine it was the ethernet I wanted to restart, but yours may be wlan. The ethernet interface on my machine was enp0s3.

3. Use the ifconfig commands @encgoo mentioned. sudo ifconfig enp0s3 down && sudo ifconfig enp0s3 up. Replace enp0s3 with your own interface name of course.

The plain and simple truth is: This is not possible in current versions of VirtualBox. The reason can be easily understood when looking at the driver’s source code:

pAdapter->MacAddr.au8[0] = 0x08 | 2; // DB: computes to 10 == 0x0A
pAdapter->MacAddr.au8[1] = 0x00;
pAdapter->MacAddr.au8[2] = 0x27;

pAdapter->MacAddr.au8[3] = (uIfIndex >> 16) & 0xFF;
pAdapter->MacAddr.au8[4] = (uIfIndex >> 8) & 0xFF;
pAdapter->MacAddr.au8[5] = uIfIndex & 0xFF;

It simply uses the interface index to create a MAC address. This index is managed by Windows and provided to the driver at initialization in the NDIS_MINIPORT_INIT_PARAMETERS structure.

You can easily inspect the index in the route print command:

===========================================================================
Interface List
 10...c0 7c d1 c0 37 71 ......Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller
 13...0a 00 27 00 00 0d ......VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter
...

13 equals 0x0D, and that’s the MAC address.