How can I get winexe to attach to a non-standard port?

Question

I'm using winexe to communicate with Windows running inside a virtual machine on my Linux system, to perform various test scenarios. I really don't want to have to be root to start the VMs.

When I start my Linux virtual machines, which I control with SSH, I simply map the SSH port (22) to a different, non-reserved port (>1024; say 19000). So I can start the VM without requiring root privileges. Then I use ssh -p 19000 ... when I want to ssh to the VM, and it works great.

But I cannot find a way to have winexe choose a different port than the default (I'm not sure what the default port is , actually; does it use 445 like SMB?). Is there a way to do it?

Note I cannot run an SSH server on Windows; because of my test environment requirements I can't add an SSH server to the virtual machines. Plus even if I were allowed I've had nothing but pain trying to get an SSH server to work reliably on Windows.

Answer 1

Winexe source code shows that the client-server communications happen over SMB in named pipes. As if you would write into unix pipes over nfs.

This results that it is very unlikely, that you can change the port. Maybe you can do that on the Linux side, but you have probably no way to do that in your Windows VM.