Using XOrg on a FreeBSD Server

[Roland Smith]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 07:14:35PM +1300, Logan Moore wrote:
> I'm looking for some advice from some of the pro's here.
> 
> I've set up FreeBSD on one of my servers, and I have a nice 24" 1920x1200
> monitor plugged into it. 

Does it have a decent video card that is supported by Xorg and can actually
drive it?

> It seems a shame to be  wasting such a decent
> monitor on a simple black and white terminal, so I've been contemplating
> installing XOrg on the server to get a bit of extra functionality from the
> terminals. I'm not thinking KDE or Gnome... just a simple window manager
> like one of the *box's or even just straight up xdm running terminals and
> maybe some basic GUI tools like a text editor/file manager.

Be aware that the modular Xorg consists of a lot of ports. A quick & dirty count
('pkg_info -rx xorg- | grep Dependency|sort|uniq|wc -l') gives 139 ports
required by xorg.

> Should I be concerned about any security implications from using XOrg?

Xorg requires write access to /dev/mem and /dev/io, which doesn't work if you
are running in secure mode (kern.securelevel > 1). I think it will work if you
raise the securelevel after starting X. But you cannot restart X.

Also, x-terminals like xterm or urxvt are usually installed setuid root.

By default, Xorg also listens for network connections. You can disable this by
adding the '-nolisten tcp' option to the X server arguments, e.g. use 'startx
-- -nolisten tcp'.

> Are there any reasons why I definitely should avoid installing XOrg?

Depends on how paranoid you are, I guess. :-) One could take the position that
every added application is a possible security hole, and that a server should
only have the applications and libraries required for its tasks installed.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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