Peter Suetterlin wrote:
Petr Cerny wrote:
I haven't mentioned starting a whole X session (I suppose you understand it as fully fledged GNOME/KDE environment). What Xnvc/vncserver does is a matter of configuration.
Sure, it's still the X server plus some window manager. With 20 users doing that on our server that might consume quite a part of its memory that is much better used for data processing...
My guess(!) is, that 20 users running X-forwarded terminals are going to consume more resources than 20 users having regular ssh sessions with occasional display to a Xvnc server. Interactions of the remote application window with others (read expose events triggered when part of a window is uncovered) can easily waste resources. Window managers like open/fluxbox, icewm have low overhead. Actually, if you only need to display one window (say matplotlib output spawned from IPython), you might be better off without any window managers at all.
Speaking of console application that may open a X window, that is actually easily done with VNC as well. Just ssh to the remote side, export the DISPLAY environment variable pointing to a Xvnc server running on that machine and you are all set up (you may need to export XAUTHORITY as well).
Yes. It's possible. But needs (quite some) configuration, opposite to the X forwarding.
Um, short script that gets executed by vncserver at startup that runs whatever you want to get the X environment ready. For me it looks something like (~/.vnc/xstartup): #!/bin/sh xrdb $HOME/.Xresources xsetroot -solid grey xterm -geometry 96x40+10+10 -ls & None of those are actually needed to be able to display something on the server.
I guess my main issue is your general condemnation of forwarding. For me, this largely depends on context. Our main use of forwarding is an ssh -X login to a server, run computational-heavy stuff in languages like IDL or Python from the command line, and display results. This in the local network.
Your assumed application(?)
True, yet...
rather is running something like a browser or IDE via forwarding. I completely agree with you that for that purpose VNC is superior. But X forwarding in ssh *does* have many reasonable applications.
... no. I'd put it this way: in some cases, the overhead of writing a script that would make VNC as simple to use as ssh X11 forwarding (or issuing 3 commands instead of just one) might seem unjustifiable.
And I strongly believe that no cat is harmed by doing it :D Well, you never know, which way the superposition is going to collapse until you open the box... :)
Thanks Cheers Petr -- Petr Cerny Mozilla/OpenSSH maintainer for SUSE Linux -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org