[H-GEN] VNC for console apps??

[Paul Gearon]

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On 16 May 2003, Russell Stuart wrote:

> Does anybody know if there exists a program that will let a remote user
> view on Linux console & send keystrokes to it?  Like a text version of
> VNC really.
>
> The reason is the same as typical usage of VNC - I have users who run
> console based programs hundreds of k's away, who ring up and say
> something has gone wrong.  It would save usual rigmarole of "press this
> then press that then read back to me the lines on the screen".

No I don't know of anything like this (not to say that it can't exist).

Usually, anything pertinent to be sent to the Linux console will show up
in the output of one or more of dmesg, /var/log/syslog and
/var/log/messages.  The only things that don't show up here are register
dumps from kernel panics, but if that happened you can't connect with the
network anyway.  I've yet to hear of anything that CAN appear on the
console without appearing in one of those places, unless you cut system
logging right back.  (Might be wrong there... I'd have to check the kernel
sources for how things like printk() work, as I haven't looked in a
while).

I'm not sure that I can see why you'd want to send keystrokes to the
console (other than things like the Alt-SysRq combinations, but again you
want to be at the console for this).  If you really had to send keystrokes
to a console, then use ssh to connect, and have it XForward a console
window back to you.  The messages you've missed should be in the above
mentioned places.

If there's something that you really need that ISN'T covered by the above,
then I'd be curious to hear about it please...

Regards,
Paul Gearon

Software Engineer                Telephone:   +61 7 3876 2188
Plugged In Software              Fax:         +61 7 3876 4899
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