Make destroying and recreating of hostonly adapter optional

[fsimmend]

On Windows systems destroying and recreating the hostonly adapter every time you run a vagrant destroy and a vagrant up has two major drawbacks:

• creating adapters requires admin rights and you need to click on UAC popup or you aren't even allowed to do so in restricted environments. We have lots of customers, where devs aren't allowed to have admin rights. For those customers an initial installation with VirtualBox/VMware + one correct configured adapter would mean that they could use vagrant as their workflow and man they loved it.
• windows/VirtualBox does not like it when create adapters in 50% of the creations windows runs into problems and then provides the adapter with an APIPA address (169.254.x.x) plus default subnet mask (255.255.0.0). When this happes you are screwed, vagrant continues runs the providers and probably everything wen't well but hey you cannot talk to your box any more or in multiple vm case the boxes can't talk to each other.

@mitchellh : we talked about this at chefconf and you told me that i should create the issue, here it is.

[fsimmend]

you can close #1014 btw.

[thasmo]

I've also encountered the problem with a host adapter being created with the mentioned IP (169.254.x.x) and subnet mask (255.255.0.0) and somehow really had problems to delete the adapter again.

[akshah123]

I have also seen this problem with windows 8. Has anyone found a work around that might get this to work until this issue is resolved? I have tried pretty much everything including re-installing virtualbox and destroying and rebuilding the box.

[fsimmend]

as i've written in #1014 , you can create a dummy VBox definition, that uses a once correctly configured adapter and by doing that, prevent Vagrant from destroying and recreating it.

[akshah123]

Hi fsimmend,

Thanks for the reply. The problem is that I don't have any "correctly" configured adapters. Every adapter has this problem. Also, when I try to update it in "Network and security center" in windows, I get following error:

"in order to configure tcp/ip, you must install and enable a network adapter card"

I tried manually creating a box (outside of vagrant) but even that doesn't succeed.

[mpiasta-ca]

Having major issues with this as well. I'm on "Windows 8" and it really screws up the network adapters. I used to be able to create a host-only adapter with an IP like "192.168.30.1", but after using vagrant for a while, whenever I try even making a manual host-only adapter, it always changes to "169.254.xxx.xxx". There is serious issues when combining Windows 8, Virtualbox, and Vagrant -- to the point that my internet connection gets corrupted, and I have to uninstall and reinstall the Ethernet adapter driver on my machine to get it working again. Wasted so much time in the past few weeks because of these issues.

[mpiasta-ca]

Here I am still a month later. I updated my network adapter to latest driver, but no help there. Windows 8 still refuses to let me use my own IP address and always returns to a random APIPA address (169.254.x.x). I can't even choose my own APIPA address. Everytime I restart Vagrant, it launches a new host-only connection.

As @fsimmend originally mentioned, we need a way to block Vagrant from trying to create a new host-only adapter. ie. something like this:

config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "169.254.40.71", create_new: false

Where setting "create_new" to false would skip trying to create a new host-only adapter.

[mitchellh]

@mpiasta-ca Vagrant only attempts to create a new host only network adapter if no other host only network adapter exists that matches your IP subnet/mask.

As for the original issue, as I said in #1324, I might just disable host only network creation in Vagrant, so this will be fixed. Watch that issue!