VirtualBox Laptop - DNS and Time Sync

I boot Windows 10 natively on my laptop, and use VirtualBox to run a Linux VM for when I need those tools. I would seriously consider using Hyper-V for my laptop virtualization needs if it provided accelerated graphics for Linux, but it doesn't, so I don't.

Because it's a laptop, I find that I suspend and resume quite a bit, and often when I do so I'm connecting to a new network at the same time. Even with Guest Additions installed, this can confuse the guest Linux so networking is broken (wrong DNS servers in use) and the time is way off (it didn't notice the sleep/resume). To fix these things, there are a couple of settings that I configure on every VM that I'm working with.

Both settings are configured using the vboxmanage command.

To resolve the DNS issue, I configure VirtualBox to forward DNS requests to the host OS, which then looks them up. By doing so, only the host needs to care about its network configuration changing. This is done by running:

VBoxManage.exe modifyvm "VM name" --natdnshostresolver1 on

To make sure the clock gets reset after a lengthy sleep, use the following:

VBoxManage.exe guestproperty set "VM name" "/VirtualBox/GuestAdd/VBoxService/--timesync-set-threshold" 10

This ensures that if the VM falls behind by 10 seconds or more, the Guest Additions will jump the clock forward to the current time.

Naturally, you need to stop and start the VM to pick up these changes.