But you do obviously need a network path from the PC you're working on to the LAMP appliance. Internet is only required for updates, installation of apps and backups with TKLBAM.

If you are running this in a virtual machine, there are three different types of networking you can use.  Bridged, NAT, and Host Only.  Bridged means it gets its own IP address, NAT means it piggybacks off of your computer's IP and Host Only means it can only communicate with your computer.  If you don't have a network connection, you would still be able to access the virtual machine if it is set to NAT or Host Only.

:)

What seems to work for me is to set the LAMP appliance up with two network adapters inside Virtualbox (using latest version, also running on a Macbook).

The first is set up as a host-only, so it gets an address from VBox's built in NAT that looks something like '192.168.56.101'.  That is the interface that all the ports that the appliance offers - ssh, http/https, the webmin interface, shell-in-a-box, phpmyadmin, etc. are offered up on.

The other interface is set up via regular Vbox NAT (the default connection type).  It gets its address from the NAT dhcp server, something like '10.0.0.2' or whatever, but really all this interface is for is to get updates.  When the virtual machine is up and the laptop is connected, I can run 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' and it'll automagically get the updates via its NAT'd connection.  The rest of the time, even when the laptop isn't connected, I can still connect to it via the 'host-only' net using ssh, https, etc.

HTH,

Monte