xorg on a headless, mouseless, keyboardless box

[Lane]

On Saturday 16 December 2006 17:11, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> On Dec 16, 2006, at 10:24 AM, Lane 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.
> >
> > Is this even possible?
> >
> > I've been looking at the handbook:
> >
> > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x-
> > xdm.html#AEN6864
> >
> > But it doesn't jump out at me how I should make this work.
> >
> > I've edited /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/xdm-config and Xaccess to listen
> > for the
> > connection, but when I run
> >
> > xdm
> >
> > on the remote box it fails with "No core pointer"
> >
> > So I followed the limited instructions on the X wiki and added
> >
> > Section ServerFlags
> > 	option "AllowMouseOpenFail"
> > EndSection
> >
> > But now I get
> >
> > Fatal error: no screens found.
> >
> > Is it even possible to have the remote headless box host an X session?
> >
> > thanks,
> >
> > lane
>
> Lane,
> 	Did you by chance remove keyboard / mouse support from your kernel?
> kldstat(8) may hold the answers, unless you have the mouse compiled
> directly into the kernel. Sounds like that may be your problem:
> <http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-newbie@vger.kernel.org/
> msg06918.html>.
> 	So you could try commenting out the mouse and keyboard references,
> just to see what happens..
> 	Another solution that you may want to look into as an alternative to
> using xdm is X11 forwarding via SSH.
> -Garrett
Garrett, 

Thanks for responding.

No, it's an SMP kernel which includes GENERIC.

Do you mean commenting out references to mouse and keyboard 
in /sys/i386/conf/GENERIC?

Like these:

device          atkbdc          # AT keyboard controller
device          atkbd           # AT keyboard
device          psm             # PS/2 mouse

That seems a little extreme  - recompiling the kernel to get X to work?  I'll 
certainly do it if the technique is endorsed by anyone ... but I'm not so 
much ready to "see what happens," as the server is thirty miles away behind a 
locked door, and I may not like what happens, at all :)

Yeah, the ssh -X "trick" works great for userland stuff.  But I haven't yet 
fingered out how to run a gui process on the remote as "root" and get by the 
authentication issues.

Do you have any experience with that?

Thanks, again.

Lane