According to Sean A. Walberg:
On Wed, 2002-04-17 at 16:07, Ihor Jakowec wrote:
I would like to login to the University of Winnipeg's mainframe, with an X window interface, from my personal computer at home. Up to now I have just been logging in with telnet ( in text mode).
2 ways come to mind
- SSH in from your machine to the UofWs. X-tunneling (if they've
allowed it) will let you run X clients on their machines, but be displayed on yours.
That's probably the best way to do it, particularly if you're only interested in running a few individual X applications, launched from the command line, as opposed to getting the whole X login environment of the remote host.
It also has the advantage of being more secure.
- Telnet in. Set $DISPLAY to your ip:0.0 and then run an X client, ie
mybox$ telnet uofw blah blah uofw$ export DISPLAY=my.ip.address:0.0 uofw$ xterm &
That's another option, of course, but a bit more tedious and error-prone. You'd also have to give your X server permission to accept connections from the remote host system, since the X clients on that host will be trying to connect back to your server directly. (The beauty of the X-tunneling option in SSH is that's all taken care of, and each end thinks it's dealing with local client/server connections.)
Or are you looking for an XDMCP login?
I think that's what he had in mind, as that's what had been discussed during the round-table discussion at the last MUUG meeting. I know that works at the U of M, but the U of W may not allow XDMCP-managed connections from remote addresses. (Perhaps it's not allowed for the same security reasons a lot of campuses are no longer allowing telnet, ftp, and other protocols that exchange passwords as clear text.)
It's also possible the U of W allows it, but we don't know what host should be queried for XDMCP support. Anyone from the U of W listening, who may know the answer?