CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxwindowssshservervirtualbox
Patrick Rosenthal
Patrick Rosenthal

Reputation: 21

Windows program to communicate with Virtualbox

I am wondering if it is possible to write a program on Windows that communicates with a program within a Linux Virtualbox on the same machine. If this is possible, what is the best approach to doing this? Is there a way to do this without using the internet to communicate?

I found instructions showing how you could potentially use SSH, but I have never tried doing this before, so I do not know if using SSH to communicate would be the best option.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 215

Answers (1)

Mark Setchell
Mark Setchell

Reputation: 208043

I was going to put this as a comment to a very vague question, but then it got too long.

It depends what you mean by "communicate"....

  • If the Windows machine should start a program on the Linux VM, you probably want plink.exe - see here.

  • If you want to transfer whole files, you probably want scp or FTP or FileZilla - see here.

  • If you want to send small messages occasionally, maybe netcat, also known as nc - see Netcat Cheatsheet here.

  • If you want full-on, high speed, continuous messages, maybe sockets or some messaging protocol like mqtt.

  • If you want to share data structures, like lists, queues or sets, you could allow both Windows and the Linux machine to access a shared Redis database - see here.

  • Or maybe it is enough to share a filesystem between the two machines - in which case you can make a Shared Folder in VirtualBox on your host and the VM can just mount that and read/write it. See diagram:

enter image description here

Upvotes: 2

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