On Tuesday 21 October 2003 19:14, Damian O'Hara wrote:
Robert McWilliam wrote:
On Tuesday 21 October 2003 15:14, Damian O'Hara wrote:
John Pettigrew wrote:
I have a spare PC (my old work PC) that I'd like to set up downstairs so that we can log in to check email etc. while the other person's working on the main PC. To keep configs etc. as easy as possible, I'd like to log into the main PC from the spare PC, using the userid and home dir from the main machine, but to run all apps etc. on the spare PC (a smart terminal, I guess).
Is this easy to set up using SUSE 8.2 on both machines? How should I go about it? Network is already done - it's the logging in and setting up the session that I don't know about.
John
Run vncserver on the main PC and vncviewer on the spare.
See http://www.realvnc.com/ for more info but the software is on the CDs.
Damian
vnc isn't actually what you want. VNC allows you to export an x connection across a network but all of the processing is still done on the machine running the vncserver. VNC uses a dumb client.
My thoughts on the way to do it would be by exporting some (or all) of the main machines file system via nfs and then mounting them on the second machine at boot time to use the same log in details and home directories etc. on both but that might run into problems with hardware specific configs. You would need to know which bits you need to export , and a way of mounting them during the boot process. I don't know either. Perhaps someone else can help?
Robert
Robert,
I'm very clear on what VNC does and what it offers instead of NFS/NIS. I do it for a living.
John however seems to be at the beginning of his experience with Linux and the simplest way to do what he wants to do is to use VNC. All account info and applications would then already be set up.
At some stage you have to decide how much processing power you want to take from the main PC in exchange for functionality/difficulty in configuration. NFS also takes resource whenever a transaction occurs, and this includes a "stat" of the pwd when shell commands are issued :o)
Exporting part of a machine's filesystem for use by another machine is problematic unless you KNOW what you're doing. I suggest John doesn't want/need to truck with this. A rule of thumb - export data, not OSs.
Damian
Just to support what has been said I feel that NIS/NFS would be overkill on a 2 node network. If it is an excercise in learning how to setup a larger lan then that's fine. Go ahead. NIS is wonderful on a big lan. NIS and NFS documentation is written by Linux users. Sometimes it's even worse than man pages. Unless you can tempt the last poster to translate it for you. My 0.02 Euros ;-)