Sugar OS Neighbourhood (F1 key):
2 VirtualBoxes running Sugar on the Same Network appear as one to jabber.sugarlabs.org

As I plan to plan to play with Squeak interface to Sugar / OLPC Low Level Activity API , which includes things like Journal interface (Datastor API), Security, and Sharing (Presence API), I wanted to first test how it works with existing Sugar Activities.

I should have really started with the Journal Datastore stuff, as it does not require sharing to be setup. But sharing is the more exciting part, that I have been avoiding since I only have one OLPC, and failed to setup sharing under virtualization in the past. But now, with Sugar on a Stick and mainly Sugar in VirtualBox, it is easy to have two or more virtual OLPC's at home, at setup sharing. I did setup Sugar in VirtualBox , and was finally able to play with Presence and Activity sharing between my OLPC and a virtual OLPC running Sugar on Linux (same for Windows or OS X).

Well the long story above brings me to one problem I am having. Running one instance of Sugar on OLPC, and another one in VirtualBox on another system at the same network works fine. What that means is that, on either system, I can go to the Sugar "network neighborhood" (many dots button, or F1), and the systems see each other as they are announced both through jabber.sugarlabs.org . But when I create 2 Virtualboxes on my home network, each running Sugar, only one of them has the neighborhood showing other users at a time. They clearly fight with each other - they must appear as one system to the jabber.sugarlabs.org. If one of the virtual boxes asks for it's neighborhood, it "steals" it from the other which is wiped out. I tried all possibilities VirtualBox 2.2 offers: "NAT Network", "Bridge Network", "Intenal Network", "Host only Network". (Really the only reasonable alternative for what I am doing, is the "NAT Network" or "Bridge Network"). But in all cases both VirtualBox'ed Sugar OSs appear as one to jabber - even on "Bridge Network" where both VirtualBod'ed machines ifconfig shows different IPs.

I know the above is not enough info to figure out the reason, but wanted to document this in case others have the same problem and/or figured it out.

I did not try netstat or other network tools to figure it out as that is usually a recipe for a lost weekend :).