IPC between vimage instances?

[Ragnar Lonn]

Hello,

I've been using vimage on FreeBSD 4.11 along with Netgraph to setup a system
that simulates many physical client machines for the purpose of testing 
broadband
Internet access hardware. I have hundreds of vimages, each with its own 
ngeth0
network interface connected via Netgraph to a real physical interface. 
It is working
very well indeed but now I'm trying to setup logging from the various 
vimage
instances and have run into problems. Each vimage runs applications that
I want to log the output from in an orderly manner. I'd like to use 
syslog but as
it turns out, the processes inside a vimage cannot communicate with the 
syslogd
in the "default" vimage. I tried logging to the Unix domain socket 
/var/run/log but
that didn't work from within a vimage (other than "default" of course).

What ways are there to do IPC between applications in different vimages?

I know I can connect them using Netgraph and virtual network interfaces but
setting up more network interfaces means a lot of housekeeping as those 
interfaces
can't be removed when I remove vimages from the system. I dont want to send
actual traffic out onto the network either, as that might interfere with 
the test
traffic to/from the machine.

Any ideas?

Regards,

  /Ragnar