Re: text login to X

In article <CYvUf.724$bX5.274@dukeread04>,
Timothy Larson <thelarsons3@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello,

I am a programmer pressed into sysadmin duties in a small office because
I'm the most technical person there. I can handle it because we don't
need anything too complex.

The problem is that I'm not always available. Trying to anticipate
situations where I don't have any access beyond a cell phone to talk to
someone at the office, I want to set up the system so that a novice can
look at the display and at least give me a few diagnostics and maybe
even click a button to restart a service if necessary. This would be
much easier (safer) than trying to dictate cryptic commands over the
phone. However, I don't want to run X on the servers all the time - I
want a text-based login prompt.

How can I configure these novices' accounts so that a text-based login
launches a X11 session when they are at the console, and be
automatically logged out when they kill that session? Once I'm there,
it would be easy to pop a couple xterms displaying system status and
write some minimal "control panel" to restart essential services.

Put "startx" in their .profile, like we did in the old days before the
nice GUI login window.

--
Barry Margolin, barmar@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Arlington, MA
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