[Chipensaw]

Hello All,

New to this forum, was on Nekochan for a long time until it went offline.  Hoping to run into some old friends from the past!

I have an O2100 which I had setup to run headless through my local network via Cygwin and Xnest on Kali Linux.  All worked well after following the "Headless Desktop" wiki as seen here: https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Headless_desktop which was a carryover from Neko's wiki pages.

I had shutdown my O2100 for awhile, dabbling in other hobbies only to return and find I cannot connect anymore.  No changes were made prior to my last headless connection to the O2100.  I have since reloaded Cygwin on my Windows machine, I have also freshly installed Xnest on the Linux box.  Per the Headless instructions above, I have verified the PROM settings, XDM-Config has been checked for accuracy, the MIT-Magic Cookie has been added to the O2100's Xauth list, etc/hosts has entries for the Windows and Linux machines, basically everything has been verified, tried and verified over and over with the same result - black screen on both Cygwin and Xnest.

I do see an error in the xdm-error log saying "unable to open X".  No other errors stand out as the culprit.  Hoping someone here has had the same issue and may be able to help.  To clarify, I can connect via Telnet and run commands.

Your help is much appreciated!

Jay

[Raion]

My suspicion is that GNU/Linux and Cygwin have changed significantly since that article was written. That's a huge trouble of why I just don't clone the Nekochan wiki and articles. Most of them were terribly written or are even obsolete on normal systems.

My suggestion would be to firstly try remote X on another SGI. If that works, then you can confirm your stuff isn't at fault.

Also welcome back. I am the main dude that runs this place, along with help from Dodoid, Micrex22 (You knew him as IBMFiles if you were on Nekochan concurrently towards the end of its life), Kaigan (a newcomer I met at VCF East '19), and Dexter1, whose our staff veteran here.

If you have any suggestions, questions or anything let me know. I'm still working on making the site better at every opportunity so when feasible I incorporate as many suggestions as we can!

[Chipensaw]

Thanks Raion!  When you say try remote X on another SGI, do you mean a second SGI to the 2100?  If so I am out of luck as the 2100 is my only SGI right now.  Anything else I could try?  Is it possible to have another enthusiast Remote X into my 2100?

Thank you!

[Raion]

Easy there, you can't write inside a quote box. You need to change to BB code mode and wrap the code properly if you wanna do that.

It's the opposite of emails - you reply from the bottom, not the top like an email/usenet. Had to fix your post.

Anyways, yes, I meant using a desktop to use remote X. I'd personally advise against pushing your bare session out on the clearnet, you'll be opening yourself up to all kinds of security exploits. But you could either if someone is nearby (we do have a fair number of WA/OR folks here) have them come over with an Indy and try it, or you could probably do a sort of VPN connection to make it safe to do that.

It's really hard to say if those instructions will work on a modern Windows or GNU/Linux box because they've changed so much. Short of setting up an older PC with a period-correct Linux install (Say from 10-15 years ago) I'm unsure of your best option. With Linux no longer using initscripts, using systemd and in many cases rootless X and modern Windows using WSL and deprecating so much stuff, it's hard to say if the communication protocols will even work as expected.

[Chipensaw]

Sorry Raion, I see what I did there.  I understand what you are saying, makes sense.  Thanks for the insight.  I will keep investigating a workaround and report back if I am successful.  Thanks for your help!

[Chipensaw]

Sometimes you just need to talk it out!  Thanks Raion!  Reading your comments caused me to search an alternative solution which lead me to a post that talked about a program called Mobaxterm and how it worked with Windows 10 and Irix 6.5.30.  I downloaded and installed it, and in less than 1 minute I had a full remote desktop!

Thanks again!

[Raion]

Oh shit nice. Glad it worked!