I guess i need to be asking more specific questions.
I saw the same issue has been raised a few years ago and apparently there was no solution for it back then, so i thought i'd check again.
The question is about bypassing mpiexec and trying to connect already running processes (which already have some data in memory to share with mpi tasks) into a single communicator without having to spawn yet another process with mpiexec.
Suppose one of this processes uses MPI_Comm_accept, and the other somehow know the mpi port name and would use MPI_Comm_connect() to connect to it.
Everything works as long as both server and client started with mpiexec -n 1. However, without mpiexec, the same attempts cause errors and connection never happens: