connecting two machines by serial port

[sabcio]

Hi, I want to connect two virtual machines (CentOS) through serial ports. How to configure those two machines to get them working? I'm using windows 7 as host for virtual box.

[sabcio]

No help?? I know how to connect them by ethernet but I need to do it by serial ports. No one every did it?

[Perryg]

Since both of your guests would need to connect to the hosts port to make this happen I don't see it working because they can not share the resource.
AFAIK serial ports are a one-to-one connect much like USB devices. Only one can access it at a time.

[sabcio]

it is possible because its done in a laboratory at my studies... but its done on Linux fedora and I have windows 7. Those are parts of XML configuration files from a computer that has 4 virtual centOS and that can be connected through serial ports
machine 1:

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 <UART>
        <Port slot="0" enabled="true" IOBase="0x3f8" IRQ="4" hostMode="HostDevice" path="/dev/ttyS3"/>
        <Port slot="1" enabled="true" IOBase="0x2f8" IRQ="3" hostMode="HostPipe" path="/tmp/ttyASK12" server="true"/>
</UART>

machine 2:

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 <UART>
        <Port slot="0" enabled="true" IOBase="0x3f8" IRQ="4" hostMode="HostPipe" path="/tmp/ttyASK23" server="true"/>
        <Port slot="1" enabled="true" IOBase="0x2f8" IRQ="3" hostMode="HostPipe" path="/tmp/ttyASK12"/>
</UART>

to connect them:

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[root@ask030100 ~]# pppd /dev/ttyS1 9600 192.168.100.1:192.168.100.2

and on the second virtual machine

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[root@ask030200 ~]# pppd /dev/ttyS1 passive 9600

and those two virtual machines communicate by serial ports.

[Perryg]

Ah virtual serial ports. Not the real serial ports. Easy enough for Linux but you need a helper for Windows.
It is in the manual though:

You can tell VirtualBox to connect the virtual serial port to a software pipe on the host. This depends on your host operating system:

On a Windows host, data will be sent and received through a named pipe. You can use a helper program called VMware Serial Line Gateway, available for download at http://www.l4ka.org/tools/vmwaregateway.php . This tool provides a fixed server mode named pipe at \\.\pipe\vmwaredebug and connects incoming TCP connections on port 567 with the named pipe.

[sabcio]

Thanks for your help. I'll check it later. Hope it works.

[re3bo0t]

If it is not used helper by windows how?