Would love to be able to run Simulator TCP over something other than localhost

[lovettchris]

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Describe problem solved by the proposed feature
Thanks to how Windows "WSL2" works, "localhost" communication from wsl to windows no longer works as WSL2 is a running in a completely separate virtual machine.

Describe your preferred solution
Allow void Simulator::run() to specify a destination ip address other than INADDR_ANY which only works on local host for tcp connections. For example, I tested this to connect AirSim running on my windows machine and it works: "_myaddr.sin_addr.s_addr = inet_addr("172.24.144.1");"

Describe possible alternatives
Perhaps there is a way to bridge localhost on WSL2 to localhost on my host PC but I couldn't find an easy way to do it.

Additional context
But being able to communicate with simulator running on a different machine has other good advantages - for example, load balancing so PX4 and AirSim for example are running on different machines. For example, it would be cool if I could run PX4 SITL on my raspberry pi and AirSim on my big box with 2080 graphics card.

[lberridge1992]

Would also love to be able to do this Chris, I managed to use SSH port forwarding as a workaround to talk from a PC running Airsim to a VM running PX4 that was on Virtual Box with a bridged network connection but not sure if WSL supports this. Seems to work without any dodgy side effects other than needing to make sure Airsim is launched before PX4 SITL.

[Jaeyoung-Lim]

@lovettchris I think #15965 would already be sufficient for your needs

[lovettchris]

Close, I added a comment to #15965, for this to work in the WSL situation it would need to support explicit ip address instead of just host name, because hostname is ambiguous in the WSL case.

[lovettchris]

Fix is in master, closing the issue.