can I connect a guest to a host via virtual serial ports (so the host sees a serial port too)

[TomZ]

I guess what I need is a host virtual serial port that can connect to a guest virtual serial port.

My reading suggests that the answer is no, I see that the host will need to connect to a named pipe. I hope that I am wrong and that there is a way.

My need is to be testing my app's serial I/O on the host and using a guest as the other end of the serial connection. This solution would allow me to turn my test machine off and save the planet. See this really is important!

I know that I could go guest to guest, but my dev environment is already on the host and stable etc.

Z

Host: dual amd, 3 gb ram, xp sp2, workstation 6.02

Guest: xp or win2k i really don't care, just needs to run my little perl app that simulates the 'real world' serial device.

[mbeierl]

I don't know how the serial ports get connected via pipes on Windows, but I do know that the Windows API for serial communications does not know the difference between a real com: port and the Windows named pipe entries.

The naming convention is like so:

.\pipe\+PipeName+

and you can usually use that in place of "com:" in programs.

[TomZ]

Thanks, however i found a different solution that does not answer my question but solves my need.

the open source driver com0com ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/com0com )allows me to run both my software under test and the simulator on a single machine by simulating a com to com connection (they call it a null-modem emulator). This works on my physical machine as well as in virtual machines.

Z