[PLUG] configuring a server without X

[Longman, Bill]

>I've got X on all my servers, but that's so I can configure them and turn X

>back off. I take that back, I've got a FREESCO firewall that doesn't have a

>GUI on the floppy :-) 
>I'd like to know more about how to do this.  It's probably obvious to
>many people how to run X apps off a remote machine through ssh, but it's
>not clear to me.  Does anyone have a link to something that explains this?

One thing you'll notice when you forward your X connections is the change of
the DISPLAY variable. You local machine's session will have DISPLAY=:0 or
DISPLAY=machine:0 or something like that. Before the days of SSH, you'd have
to set DISPLAY to the correct value so the client would know where to spray
it's output. Another scenario:

$ echo $DISPLAY
mymachine:0.0
$ telnet remotemachine
Login: me
Password:
Welcome to remotemachine
remote$ echo $DISPLAY

remote$ export DISPLAY=mymachine:0
remote$ xterm &

(xterm displays locally)

But with SSH, here's what happens:

$ echo $DISPLAY
mymachine:0.0
$ ssh remotemachine
Enter passphrase for key '/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa':
remote$ echo $DISPLAY
remote:10.0

All your clients will get their traffic "forced" through this display, in
order to get through the tunnel to your local machine's X server.

WEL