xorg on a headless, mouseless, keyboardless box

[Lane]

On Saturday 16 December 2006 12:34, Andrew Pantyukhin wrote:
> On 12/16/06, Lane <lane at joeandlane.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I need to run X ... or in some way gain access to
> > the display output on a remote box that has neither
> > mouse, keyboard, or console.
>
> Can you tell us what you really need?
>
> Try "ssh -X user at box" and running gui apps or
> even startx there.
Andrew,

"What I need" is a tall order :)

What I'd like is an understanding of how X can be used for remote connections, 
such as is described here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x-xdm.html#AEN6864

I'd like to be able to work on the remote box in a graphical environment and 
not have to mount_nfs the devices I need to work with ...

I'd also like to be able to start qemu on the remote machine with a Windows 
client and be able to invoke "safe" mode.  I have a problem with a remote W2K 
image that is 4Gig compressed, and it is going to take 12 or more hours for 
me to get it copied to my local machine to fix it ... then another 12 hours 
to copy it back out there.

There are probably some switches that I can use in qemu that I may discover 
over the next 12 hours, but an understanding of how X can help might actually 
save me some time.

I've used this "ssh -X" that you mention. This works fine for "userland" 
programs, but in order to troubleshoot my particular issue I'd need to be 
logged in as root.  When I try to "su" remotely to run the command I get:

X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
X connection to localhost:10.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).

I might try logging in locally as root and see what happens .... 

But in the long run I think that if I could understand how to grant myself an 
actual X session on the remote box then I could figure out how to do this and 
potentially other stuff.

Thanks for any information you might share.

lane