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marky9074
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 10:04 am    Post subject: SSH and remote management Reply with quote

Hi there,

Yesterday was on #gentoo-sparc and asked the question what was best tightvnc or vnc. Had some excellent replies and it start to make me think so hence the post.

At the moment at home I have the following:

Asus A8V / XP3200 running XP & Slackware (hardware changes weekly, so don't really have time to install Gentoo....sorry, also maybe getting nano-itx to play with when they are on sale in UK)
Ultra 60 running Gentoo 2004.2 2.6.6 & Solaris 9

Basically I looked into options regarding connecting Ultra to a KVM....how expensive are these 8O

Sun 'did' do a adapter box that is now discontinued, and the original manufacturer for Sun no longer sells them. I see that Startech do a converter as well, which I have not seen much info about.

Anyway, long story short, thought why cant I use VNC. Ultimately, I want to put my Ultra away in the corner somewhere headless and use it remotely. Maybe eventually put the PC and Sun away somewhere and adderlink the display as well.

On research saw that tightvnc seemed better than vnc (realvnc) though someone implied that vnc may well now have the code used in tightvnc. Also it was suggested to use X11 over SSH.

As I mentioned I am trying to control my Ultra from my XP installation.

I have played around with WinAxe, software I used a few years ago that works well for displaying single apps on PC's. I understand that you can actually get this to work full screen with the hosts display manager controlling it, though I have yet to see any instructions on how to do this.

It also has a XDMCP mode, but I dont use XDM on my Gentoo install, and didnt really intend using it either. For me startx is fine :D

Breaking into another topic (sorry) I tried to telnet into the Gentoo install and couldnt, even though telnetd is installed, is there something I am missing there? (yes Mark you idiot, it is disable by default in /etc/xinetd.d/telnetd)

Bearing that in mind, I tried to export the display, didnt work (update - got it to work now, not sure what I did wrong there), then I tried to use setenv....no setenv, where did this go? In the end I used -display on a few things and managed to redirect an xterm or two to the PC, so at least thats a start.

In short I am wondering what solutions other people are using, as I would imagine this has been pondered on before.

I am a self confesed #gentoo-sparc noob so some extended explanations would be helpfull!

Thanks in advance,

Mark


Last edited by marky9074 on Wed Nov 10, 2004 8:16 am; edited 4 times in total
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zappa_the_great
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 11:39 am    Post subject: Re: SSH and remote management Reply with quote

marky9074 wrote:

Breaking into another topic (sorry) I tried to telnet into the Gentoo install and couldnt, even though telnetd is installed, is there something I am missing there?


It is probably not accepting any connections by default, since telnet always has been a big security risk. If you really want to run it, you'd probably need to add/change a configuration file for xinetd. I never bothered with it, since ssh is so much better.

Quote:

In short I am wondering what solutions other people are using, as I would imagine this has been pondered on before.


Normally, I just use ssh, since almost everything can be managed from the command line. Or I use tools like webmin, phpMyAdmin etc. For X11 connectivity I used to use Cygwin/X11 (when in Win XP) or Xnest (when in Linux) in combination with XDM on the server (/me being somewhat lazy), but I can't remember when I needed that the last time.

For physical console to my (headless) box, I just use a very very old Siemens Laptop with some terminal program on it and hook it up to the serial port. Works like a charm :D
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marky9074
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 07, 2004 2:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I saw this thread, which is along the same lines as what I have asked, in case any noobs are following this thread.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=247748&highlight=ssh

The nx client mentioned looks rather good, anyone using it? This looks again like its using XDMCP.

http://www.nomachine.com/screenshots.php

Also, after searching for 'using ssh' I am now scared to use it after all the posts regarding security......

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=210585&highlight=ssh
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marky9074
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 8:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK, so I emerged tightvnc and started vncserver which spawned a new virtual display :1 which I could connect to with the tightvnc viewer (but not with nx even though I changed the port (just realised that nx needs an nx server on the host....doohhh))

(For noobs) vncserver is a wrapper script for Xvnc, it does not connect to a display for itself. Instead, Xvnc creates a virtual desktop.......so this is of no use to me......

Saying that after some searching I found another variant x11vnc which is supposed to work how I wanted it:

x11vnc allows one to remotely view and interact with real X displays (i.e. a display corresponding to a physical monitor, keyboard, and mouse) with any VNC viewer. In this way it plays the role for Unix/X11 that WinVNC plays for Windows

Anyway, when I tried to set up tightvnc with a half decent session using openbox it connected then crashed when I opened any apps.

I installed openssh OK, but am a bit confused to how I use it. I mean I just ssh to another user and machine as usual with user/name passwd. I thought I was going to get prompted for my passphrase or had to put my public key in the authorized_keys2 file or something? I did a ssh-keygen -b 1024 -t rsa to make the keys, not not sure what I am doing to be honest...

Now I am back on the XDMCP idea....

I edited the /etc/X11/xdm/Xaccess file and opened the connection to hosts by un-commenting the line:

#* #any host can get a login window

Then opened the file /etc/X11/xdm/xdm-config and commented out the line:

DisplayManager.requestPort: 0

My WinAxe session sees it under broadcast mode, but thats as far as I get......
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marky9074
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 4:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have given up on WinAXE it reports:

Willing, but su nobody -c /etc/X11/xdm/Xwilling failed

I switched to cygwin and as usual went straight into it without reading any instructions, and after editing the startxwin.bat file, connected up to my xdm session OK!

So I guess this is the best way?
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marky9074
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 7:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

For anybody still reading....

I am testing (playing) with various PC X Servers.

Cygwin - Worked OK, though didnt handle background very well. This is far too over the top for what I want i.e. a client to attach to an XDM session.

X-Deep/32 - http://www.pexus.com/ - Worked OK (AND is also now free). Unfortunately this didnt handle backgrounds or window frames very well.

WinAXE - http://www.labf.com/ - Still unable to connect in query mode, in broadcast finds host then resets.

Omni-X - http://www.xlink.com/nfs_products/Omni-X_Server/Omni-X_Server.htm - Worked, though no full screen (just one big window), and no way to configure mouse control, ended up with just middle button :roll:

X-Win32 6.0 - http://www.starnet.com/ - Works like a dream, no compatibility problems at all........just the price that is a problem.

If anybody is using any others that are worthy of looking at please feel free to post.

Thanxs,

Mark

Oh, and I am asuming that as I am connecting up using an XDM session there is no way I can use ssh etc? Assume that I have to investigate the authentication options in X/XDM??
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marky9074
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 10:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK, I got WinAXE working, it was quite simple really.....

Under settings, and startup you need to select 'multiple+remote wm'.

Yes, I can hear you all saying that this is obvious....BUT it allows you to set up XDMCP for all the other modes as well. Just they dont work, which as we now know is obvious, so why is the option there?

Anyway, this appears to only work with a fully loaded wm i.e. kde / gnome and maybe xfce4 (in the tutorial it does only state kde/gnome). WinAXE runs a transparant server which was nice I guess, but my gkrellm was the only thing that started, I had no menu background etc using openbox. When I right clicked I got the windows menu not linux. I hope that makes sense.

I will be using X-Win32 I think..

Mark
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marky9074
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 7:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK, I now understand the fundamentals of SSH (so I think)

Use it as normal for simple operation with standard login/passwd.

Use it with keys if you want password less operation.

Lots of fine Windows utils, PuTTy for one, which incidentally gets installed with X-Win32 :)

So I now know that the safest way to play is to ssh in and run X11 over ssh....

But I don’t want to do that! I want to use XDMCP by the safest possible method (for now anyway). It’s a case of saying I can do it, then probably just use SSH and do everything on the command line, like Ciaran told me to do anyway :roll:

So what is the safest method of remote clients getting a session from XDM using XDMCP?

.........I started up xdm on my U60 today and it took a whole 2 minutes to get up on the screen. This is without changing anything, just straight out of the box so to speak, anyone seen this before? Can you just install kdm or gdm on their own?

Mark
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