VNC & SSH to the rescue

I have more computers than I have monitors. At the moment the only monitor I have available to me is a Hyundai 14” monitor that doesn't seem to want to do any graphics other than EGA quality. Normally, this would be a big problem, how to do any work with a useless monitor?

Well the monitor was good enough that I could do a SuSE install, pressing F2 at the install prompt and selecting text-mode instead of VESA. Once SuSE was installed I unplugged the monitor, unplugged the keyboard, and the mouse. Why? VNC, Virtual Network Computing. VNC lets me control one desktop from another. I don't necessarily have to be running a graphical desktop on the destination computer, in fact I have duriel set to a text-prompt login. VNC lets me log in to KDM/KDE, bypassing the problem of having a decent monitor.



What good is remote administration? Remote administration lets me make changes to duriel, work on projects that I can synchronize with mephisto, my notebook, and back up to diablo, my pvpgn server, which also happens to have a SCSI tape drive attached to it. On duriel I have a CD+/-RW and 80GB of hard drive, the most space of any of my machines. Being able to store data on duriel and then back it up to CD is critical.



If I really wanted a bit of fun I could run a network game on both computers and play both players from my notebook.

As great as VNC is I wasn't able to drag and drop from my current desktop to my other, probably a security feature, I'll have to examine this further. So, to make up for not being able to copy things via VNC, I enabled the SSH server on the remote machine. SSH also came in handy disabling the graphical login. I used SSH to log in to duriel, then I ran the non-graphical yast (graphical yast is called yast2) and switched the login from graphical to text - note that this does NOT change the graphical VNC login, which is cool.