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Date:      Fri, 1 Jun 2007 22:52:36 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Per Hedeland <per@hedeland.org>
To:        scottro@nyc.rr.com, sean-freebsd@farley.org
Cc:        freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Running "Windows Emulation" headless ... possible?
Message-ID:  <200706012052.l51Kqa9s004139@pluto.hedeland.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070531084434.F22646@thor.farley.org>

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Backing up a bit here...

"Sean C. Farley" <sean-freebsd@farley.org> wrote:
>
>On Thu, 31 May 2007, Scott Robbins wrote:
>
>> On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 01:18:07AM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>>>
>>> I want to run a Windows environment for one piece of software, but, I
>>> don't want to run it on my machine, I want to run it on a remote
>>> server ...  basically, what I'd like to do is start up the 'VM', and
>>> connect to it using vnc ... the idea is that the software needs to
>>> run 24x7, but I need to be able to connect to it from multiple
>>> locations throughout the day ...
>>>
>>> Is there something that I can do using ... Xvfb?  Or something like
>>> that?  Anyone have experience with this sort of thing?

For this purpose, I've found Xvnc (part of the tightvnc port/package) to
work great. In particular back when I ran (mutiple) vmware it was *the*
way to have them going regardless of the state of my X session, and
available remotely - though actually for Windows in vmware I connected
to a vnc server running on Windows rather than to Xvnc, that way I got
rid of the annoying vmware console window altogether:-) (for *nix in
vmware I had no use for the console other than when something got
b0rken).

>> At any rate, with qemu, you could set up the server with tap
>> networking, give the MS machine its own address on the subnet, and run
>> tightvnc server.
>
>Actually, QEMU has a built-in VNC server (-vnc).

As far as I've been able to figure out, it doesn't have any support for
authentication though, which may or may not be an issue depending on
your environment. Personally I try to mitigate that by having it listen
only on loopback, and tunnel vnc through ssh to the host for remote
connections. I've also found it (too:-) to be a bit flaky, e.g. it seems
to have a tendency to die (possibly pulling the whole qemu down) if you
move the window around or hide/expose it a lot. The big advantage with
it for me is that it brings total "headlessness" though, i.e. generally
no need to run qemu under Xvnc, which I did back before -vnc existed.

--Per Hedeland



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