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Author Topic: Remote X session on VL6 light  (Read 4520 times)

fogpipe

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Remote X session on VL6 light
« on: May 17, 2012, 12:53:25 am »
I have decided to turn my old computer into a file/backup server and run distributed computing data on it.
Im sure that i could communicate effectively enough with it using ssh and scp, but i would like to be able to login to an Xsession as well.
I couldnt find a graphical config utility for kdm so i chose xdm as the display manager as im more familiar with its config files.

I have modified the Xaccess file to allow all hosts to log in ( i plan on fixing this later with tcp-wrappers) and modified the Xservers and Xsetup file so that it will take remote logins and its currently listening on tcp port 6000.

I wont actually have the switch to connect everyting up till tomorrow afternoon, but can anyone think of anything i might have missed? Its been a while since i tried to set somethign like this up.

Thanks

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nightflier

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Re: Remote X session on VL6 light
« Reply #1 on: May 17, 2012, 03:45:29 am »
Interesting. I've not tried this kind of connection. Occasionally I've run some X programs via SSH, but never a full session. For that purpose I use VNC. Let us know how it goes.
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fogpipe

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Re: Remote X session on VL6 light
« Reply #2 on: May 17, 2012, 09:03:30 pm »
It went pretty well. Took about an hour to setup and debug, but at the same time i was setting up ssh with keys for no password logins and xforwarding.  Iirc all i really did was choose XDM as the session login manager, just because i know its setup better than the alternative, edited Xsetup and Xaccess and Xserver to allow logins and listen on a tcp port, i think i ran xhost  +$OTHERMACHINESIP on both machines and deleted .Xauthority and .ICEauthority on the target machine, the one i was logging into.
What actually took the longest was finding out where XDM was getting its session information. One of the reasons i chose XDM to manage logins is that it will read .xsession or .xinitrc. It turns out that it was specifically configured NOT to do that on VL6. These are the kinds of distro specific shenanegans that drove me to Vector in the first place.
But yeah its running great now.  but wow, i forgot how ugly XDM is :)

EDIT: this is one of the things i really love about linux, network transparency.
« Last Edit: May 17, 2012, 09:31:59 pm by fogpipe »
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M0E-lnx

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Re: Remote X session on VL6 light
« Reply #3 on: May 18, 2012, 01:03:15 pm »
You could have just did NX or vnc over ssh
NX is much faster and encrypted by nature using the ssh2 protocols
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fogpipe

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Re: Remote X session on VL6 light
« Reply #4 on: May 18, 2012, 03:03:45 pm »
Thanks for the tip, i will look into NX:)
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