Sniff data on serial ttyS0 by virtualbox COM

Question

I am running VirtualBox under linux. Gues OS is Windows XP.

I have an IR transmitter connected to serial port, (yes the old kind DE-9), on my box and added the following in VirtualBox "Serial Ports":

[v] Enable Serial Port
Port Number: COM1 IRQ: 4 I/O Port: 0x3F8
Port Mode: Host Device
Port/File_PAth: /dev/ttyS0

Added user to group for serial.

Now: I am using sniffer on host; ie jpnevulator

jpnevulator --ascii --timing-print --tty /dev/ttyS0 --read

Run Guest OS and start IR software and write data by IR (In guest OS/WinXP). The data is written, but nothing comes up in jpnevulator.

What am I missing here?

Answer 1

OK. After a lot of testing in a field I am a pure novice I found the following way to monitor traffic:

In VirtualBox "Serial Ports":

[v] Enable Serial Port
Port Number: COM1 IRQ: 4 I/O Port: 0x3F8
Port Mode: Host Pipe
Port/File_PAth: /tmp/vbwincom1

And then use

socat /tmp/vbwincom1 -

Data written to pipe is written to terminal in host linux.

This is by monitoring socket instead of serial.

If anyone have a solution for monitoring /dev/ttyS0 instead of an overlayer by socket I'll accept that as an answer - but for now this does it. Hopefully it might help someone else.

socat