[CLUE-Tech] poor man's kvm

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Thursday 19 August 2004 04:16 pm, mike havlicek wrote:
> What I was unclearly trying to describe was a way of
> displaying multiple X desktops on a single Linux box.
>
> This is probably not the most secure thing to do, but
> I find it handy on my home network. I have several
> Linux/Unix systems on my home network. I use one Red
> Hat 9 box as my main box with a keyboard mouse and
> monitor. By default the inittab on my main box is set
> to give you 6 ttys which can be toggled using alt-F#
> (1 - 6) and alt-F7 takes you to your local X session.

Ok,  on most of what I set up here I have six ttys available,  use a command 
with "tail" in it to diplay the end of one of the system logs on tty7,  and 
have top running on tty8,  so when I fire up X on any given box it shows up 
on tty9.  Not _that_ different...

> (ctrl-alt-F# to get from the X session back to one of the ttys).

Yep.

> Say I have another Red Hat 9 ( just to be accurate about the files ... could
> be another Linux or Unix ) "fred" on my home network. On fred I enable
> XDMCP.

How do you do this?

> In this example that would be setting Enable=true in the [xdmcp] section
> of /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf and restarting gdm.

I don't appear to have a gdm directory under /etc/X11 here.  I'm running 
Slackware 9.1 on this and the other box here,  a somewhat earlier version on 
my firewall/router.  Perhaps I'll have to do something a little different.

> On the main box I log in on one of the ttys and do:
>
> X -query fred :1
>
> which will fire up a desktop session associated with
> F8 in this case.

Or the next available tty in my case.

> Hmm .... I wonder if there is a "secure" way to do this.

Interesting question.  I'm not real worried about it here.  I get assorted 
spam and viruses hitting my inbox,  none of which have any effect on my 
system aside from taking up drive space,  and a few folks "knocking on the 
door" now and then trying to get through the firewall but nobody (so far) 
making any progress.  All that shows up in the logs,  too.

Mostly what I'm interested in at this point is to get a few more 
"workstations" built up and maybe to upgrade the hardware in the 
"server" (which ain't much these days!) and to optimize what I can do over 
the LAN here.

Next thing I need to look at is having all user login stuff on one box.  I 
really don't want the headaches of having multiple copies of stuff all over 
and trying to keep it all synchronized.  I know that Slackware comes with 
those "yp" packages to deal with this issue.  I've also been pointed at LDAP 
as another way of dealing with this,  but it strikes me as somewhat much for 
a smallish home network.  You guys have any comments on that one way or the 
other?

> -Mike
>
> --- "Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason at blazenet.net> wrote:
> > On Thursday 19 August 2004 01:01 am, mike havlicek
> >
> > wrote:
> > > If you are like me you have several unix/linux
> >
> > boxen
> >
> > > on a
> > > "firewalled" private network. This is old news,
> >
> > but
> >
> > > anyway, you can use the ttys assigned to your F
> >
> > keys
> >
> > > to open desktops on the other unix boxen as long
> >
> > as
> >
> > > you "open" your xdm.
> >
> > I'm not sure how you mean this to work...
> >
> > Right now I am doing something of the sort,  only
> > I'm using ssh on a console
> > to log on to a different box and then I can access
> > *one* console on that
> > other box.
> >
> > What would I be doing different?
> >
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