Failed to Change Host Network Interface Parameter (E_ACCESSDENIED) on VirtualBox Linux

While adjusting my learning environment setup, I needed to follow an existing lab environment that uses VirtualBox with a custom Host-Only network configuration.

My host machine is running:

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

By default, VirtualBox usually creates a Host-Only adapter using a subnet like:

192.168.56.1/24

However, in my case I needed to use a different subnet:

10.10.10.1/24

The problem started when I tried to change the Host-Only adapter IP address using the VirtualBox GUI or VBoxManage.

I got this error:

Failed to change host network interface parameter.

Callee RC:
E_ACCESSDENIED (0x80070005)

At first, I thought:

After trying several troubleshooting steps, I finally found that newer versions of VirtualBox restrict custom Host-Only network ranges on Linux for security reasons.

Root Cause

Newer VirtualBox versions only allow specific Host-Only network ranges by default.

Because of that, custom ranges like:

10.10.10.0/24

will be denied unless explicitly allowed.

Solution

If the /etc/vbox directory does not exist yet, create it first:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/vbox

Then create or edit the following configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/vbox/networks.conf

Add this configuration:

* 10.0.0.0/8 192.168.0.0/16

Or allow all ranges:

* 0.0.0.0/0 ::/0

Save the file.

Reload VirtualBox Kernel Modules

After updating the configuration, reload the VirtualBox modules:

sudo modprobe -r vboxnetadp vboxnetflt vboxdrv
sudo modprobe vboxdrv
sudo modprobe vboxnetflt
sudo modprobe vboxnetadp

Or simply reboot the machine:

sudo reboot

Verify Create the Host-Only Adapter Again

In my case, I created and configured the Host-Only Adapter directly from the VirtualBox dashboard after updating the networks.conf configuration.

To verify that the adapter was successfully configured with the custom IP address, I checked the interface from the terminal using:

ip a | grep vbox

Example output:

vboxnet0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 10.10.10.1/24

If the custom IP address appears on the vboxnet interface, it means the Host-Only Adapter configuration was applied successfully.

Notes

In my case, this issue was not caused by:

The main issue was VirtualBox security restrictions for custom Host-Only network ranges on newer Linux versions.

This is my personal note so I do not forget how to troubleshoot and allow custom VirtualBox Host-Only IP ranges in the future.

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