Headless

I'm currently running both of my 'servers' headless - no monitor, keyboard or mouse. I use VNC to get to the Win 98 file server, and ssh to start a tty session to the Linux IMAP server.

I'd like to run the new server the same way. (Although, I could use a KVM switch of some kind to share my desktop peripherals.) It wouldn't be tough to setup ssh on the new box, but I would like to be able to take advange of the graphical tools Mandrake is famous for.

I found this article by Vincent Zweije describing how to setup X servers and clients, but it is way beyond my experience level. Here is another link I found:

Converting Old PCs into Standalone X11 Terminals


I also found an article about Webmin which I may want to try out someday, but it seems to build a different interface for configuration - not using the Mandrake programs (not sure - more research to do).

Now, some of the books and articles I have been reading caution against running X at all on a server. They make good points, but I think the risk is higher at a corporate site, rather than at my house. I'm pretty confident that my family members would not be able to get to the server at all (or even think about doing it). Plus, I may want to use the machine as an occaisional Linux workstation - just to try things out once in a while.