[Discuss] runlevel 5 service cannot connect to display

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey (blu))]

> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
> bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of William Chan
> 
> Thanks to all. Can you tell me a bit more about the VNC approach?

I'm not totally sure we have enough info, but here's a stab at it:

Suppose you're using openindiana.  (Because that's what I have in front of me to talk about.)
You could identify a command like this, that works for your personal tastes:
	vncserver :1 -geometry 1350x820
You could make an smf service, that runs under your credentials, and automatically launches "the above command" at system startup.
You could VNC into the box, go to System / Preferences / Startup Applications, and specify an arbitrary script in there.

The net result would be, upon boot, system would automatically launch the VNC gnome desktop, which would automatically launch the specified gui application.  This technique works for all sorts of OSes, including rhel/centos and ubuntu (substitute the startup manager for your OS, rather than smf of solaris).  It's kind of a hoakey kludge, but I've used it before, when I needed a hoakey kludge.

I've used that before, to automatically launch some guest VM's on a headless server.  I know I'll draw criticism for that comment, because there are so many other solutions that would be better, but when you inherit a windows AD server as a VM guest of a headless rhel server, with $0 budget, and you're in a foreign state for one day, with your schedule completely full, no time to reformat the system and convert the xen guest into an esx (or whatever) vm...  Hells to all you who wanna laugh at me for doing it, I did the right thing by not messing with it, and simply making it work automatically.  We left it running for about 2.5 years after that, surviving power outages and everything.  It was very reliable, and I never had to drive or fly back there to mess with it ever again.  Until we closed that office and my coworker had to go there to pick up the hardware.