remote mol-sessions with X-windows or vnc.

[Andy Baxter]

On 2003.10.17 15:25, Peter Åstrand wrote:
> Andy Baxter wrote:
> 
>> Can anyone help me with some information about using Mac-on-linux to   
>> run remote displays on a number of machines over a network?
> 
> We have tried this idea. We used a setup like this:
> 
> vncviewer -- Xvnc -- MOL
> 
> The clients were running vncviewer. Xvnc was running on an Intel  
> Linux server. The MOL:s were running on a Mac with Mandrake Linux.  
> MacOS X 1.0.1 was running in MOL.

I don't understand how you have Xvnc running on a different machine to  
the MOL machine. Does the Mac export an x display to the intel machine  
with xdmcp which then sends it out to the clients using vnc? Does this  
setup help reduce the load on the Mac? Could you give some details of  
how this is set up? (Just enough so I can understand what you've done -  
not asking for config files etc.)

> The performance was OK. The largest problem so far seems to be how to  
> handle many MOL sessions on the same machine:
> 
> 1) Each MOL must use a separate partition or image file to load  
> MacOS. It might be feasible to let each user have their own 1GB image  
> file in their home directory, but it would be *much* nicer if the  
> copy-on-write functionality (earlier discussed on this mailing list)  
> could be brought back to life.

Seeing as MacOS X is built on BSD, isn't there some way you could work  
round this within MacOS by mounting the read-write parts of the MOL  
partition seperately from the read-only parts, so you only have to have  
seperate partitions for the former? (e.g. in linux you could mount / 
bin, /lib and /usr seperately from /etc and /var) I don't know how MOL  
shows the underlying linux partitions to Mac OS though.

andy.