virtualbox.org

My ignorance will show in this question, so please forgive me! I am trying to upload some files from host (Mac OS X) to guest (Xenix-386) on VB 4.3.20.
(1) In VB settings for the Xenix VM, I enabled serial ports and two named pipes, /tmp/comm1 and /tmp/comm2.
(2) in Xenix, I did the following:
mkdev serial
enable /dev/tty1a
reboot
(3) on the Mac:
socat UNIX-CONNECT:/tmp/comm1 STDIO,raw,echo=0
Ctrl-C
(4) The Xenix login screen appears on the Mac terminal and I can login without trouble. The connection is also solid.

So the serial connection works well. Now my ignorance comes in. I have C-Kermit on both systems but can't figure out how to establish contact
with the named pipe on the Mac via the kermit. I only have socat on the Mac and can't figure out if I can upload a file to the Xenix machine without
a socat running on it. Any help or suggestions will be much appreciated. It has been many years since I last used kermit although I used it daily for many years, too, way back then.

Topic moved to OS X Hosts.

I can't help you with Kermit on a Mac, but I would suggest that a floppy image is a better way to transfer files into a really old guest, assuming that networking or CD images is out of the question. Another possibility is to load up a hard disk using another VM, then transfer ownership to the dynosaur OS.

Thanks for your reply. I've done that (that was how I got C-Kermit) onto the Xenix VM), but for some files (among others I'm trying to get gcc onto the system), the size of the file exceeds 1.44mb, which is the maximum (and only) floppy size which is usable. Xenix predates CD-ROM drives. Since there is no hurry, even a slow serial connection would work fine. There should be a way to do it, but I haven't figured it out yet. Without gcc I can't get ssh (and sftp) going, although I do have a working ftp (I think). However, VB won't allow straight ftp, only sftp.

cac2 wrote:However, VB won't allow straight ftp, only sftp.

VirtualBox doesn't influence what software can run in the VM, leaving aside those that have special hardware dependencies. It also doesn't restrict what protocols software can implement above the underlying (virtual) networking hardware. People can and have run FTP in a VM.

However - if you use NAT mode in the guest that would certainly limit networking possibilities.

That's very good to know (I'm sure I read somewhere that VB only supports sftp, but it is very good to hear this from someone with much experience with VB). The problem must be then that I don't know how to get ftp contact going. Do I need TC/ICP running on the guest (Xenix)? If so I don't know what my 'domain' is. On the host, I similarly don't know how to address the vm. I've set up port forwarding so have a host ip address and port and a guest ip address and port (and these work on other vms I run (FreeBSD 9.3 and openSUSE 13.3), but I'm using ssh and sftp on these).

FTP is a protocol that communicates using TCP/IP, so yes, you'd need an underlying TCP/IP layer inside the guest OS.

You need to think of the VM as like any other PC. Especially this VM, since as an unsupported guest it'll basically get no help from the host. VirtualBox will provide all the hardware you might put inside this PC, but all the software and network protocols - and everything else - must come from the guest OS. It's unfortunate that Xenix really never took off, as that will obviously limit the software you can find for it.

We are talking here about a serial connection, nothing to do with network and TCP/IP.

You would need to find out how/if you can specify the name of the serial pipe instead of a physical port name for the connection. Maybe you need another kermit client if yours is fixed to the physical serial port names.

Martin wrote:We are talking here about a serial connection, nothing to do with network and TCP/IP.

We're well aware of that. The OP has said that he's only trying serial Kermit because he couldn't get FTP to work.