Multiple workstation networking issues

Situation as follows:

On linux on virtualbox, running an instance of whonix-gateway and whonix-workstation.

things work great and smoothly and everythings good.

But the moment you run a second (or god forbid a third, haven’t even tried that yet) whonix-workstation, weird and disfunctional things start happening with the network.

most of the time the first workstation stops being able to use internet, while the second one is able, or it becomes extremely slow, or the second one starts having problems. all in all, practically using the internet on two workstations at the same time is impossible. I’ve had this issue for a long time. It feels like the gateway is confused somehow and doesn’t know how to handle two workstations. since we’re on a virtual LAN managed by virtualbox the issue might be with the handing out of the IPs to consecutive whonix workstations, but that would’t explain why sometimes the internet does seem to work on both workstations, albeit briefly.

Would really appreciate if this gets fixed or explained how I can fix it myself.

Thanks!

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Check documentation first.

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Thanks, that seems to provide an explanation. So for each additional workstation, in its “etc/network/interfaces.d/30_non-qubes-whonix”, the “address” line IP, last octet, should be incremented by one?

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Yes.

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Okay, thanks for helping me.

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just to confirm i’m right on the networking side (trying to learn)

Each workstation has it’s own IP on the eth0 network hardcoded in the config file meaning it expects to be in the eth0 network. correct?

But why can’t the virtual eth0 network switch just use ARP or something to give each workstation its own IP automatically?

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DHCP isn’t used (yet), because:

Creating a Whonix-Workstation virtual, local LAN IP address based on the VM’s MAC address is a good idea.

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