Re: Initiating a remote X session

[Hans Dekker <hans.dekker.ext@juntadeandalucia.es>]

Hi Steve,

Being triggered when you mentioned you are using SAS, here is another 
solution that may help you. You can change the scripts with secure 
shells as you like.
We are using sas too. I have installed cygwin to be able to remotely use 
it, which works fine apart from some nitty gritty AltGr keyboard 
problems I have and you probably don't when using US keyboards.

I used the following set up to give access to users on the Unix 
containing Sas:

The startxwin.bat is modified to:

start XWin -multiwindow
xterm -T "SAS startup window" -e \\<Your server>\<Central 
directory>\initsas.sh %1%

The server and central directory are accesible to anyone using Sas.

Now, the contents of initsas.sh are:

xhost +<sas server> > /dev/null
echo Starting SAS environment...
export IPADDR=`ipconfig | grep ddress | grep "10\." | cut -f 2 -d ":" | 
cut -f 2 -d " "`
rsh <sas server> -l "${USERNAME}" "export DISPLAY=\"${IPADDR}:0.0\";cd 
/opt/sas8;sas ${1}"

Please note that:
1. The usernames for WinXP domains are the same as those used on Unix.
2. The WinXP client is given access to the Unix/Sas host by putting the 
IP-number/client name in the hosts.equiv.
3. Different versions of Windows give you different formats of ipconfig 
output.
4. Our Ip-addresses start with 10.
5. As a parameter to the startxwin.bat we use '-explorer', to be used as 
a sas startup parameter.
See your sas documentation for more options.

Hope it helps you,

H.

Steve Howie escribió:
> Howdy,
> 
> We've just had a look at cygwin-xfree and are very impressed. However, 
> we'd like to bundle it for our users so that we have a some pre-defined 
> 'sessions' available e.g. connect to a Unix host, run SAS then have the 
> output sent to an cygwin-xfree server. Unix commands are not the forte 
> of most of our users.
> 
> This is fine with a static IP address  - we would launch a program which 
> does something like:
> 
> rexec <host> -l <username> "setenv DISPLAY <ipaddress>; /opt/SAS82/sas "
> 
> from the Cygwin shell. All bets are off, however, since most of our IP 
> addresses are served out by DHCP.
> 
> We currently use X-Win32 which has a nifty feature for getting around 
> this - you can specify $MYIP:0 which picks up the current IP address of 
> the X-server and passes it to the session definition which is sent to 
> the host which will run the application.
> 
> So ideally we would like something similar to this in cygwin-xfree :
> 
> rexec <host> -l <username> "setenv DISPLAY $MYIP:0; /opt/SAS82/sas"
> 
> I did a quick dig through the archives and noticed something similar to 
> this question - but it was from a while ago - we'd ideally like to have 
> the user get a popup prompting them for a username/password for the 
> host, then pass this information via a command such as the one above, 
> and also pick up the X-servers IP address whether static or dynamic. Is 
> something like this available already?
> 
> Any info would be appreciated!
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Scotty
> ---
> Steve Howie
> Academic Services, CCS
> University of Guelph
> Guelph Ontario
> CANADA
> 
> .
>