Re: [Sheflug] headless

[nospam [at] alexhudson.com]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 02:24:40PM -0000, Ian Wright wrote:
> I have a box running a RH6.2 (-ish) workstation on which I have some robotic
> machine control software. I would like to alter this box to 'headless'
> operation - no screen, no keyboard and only contacted via ssh on the
> network. How would I alter things to give me this facility? Like, how do I
> stop it wanting a password when it starts up, can I just remove the monitor
> and keyboard without it crashing with errors, how do I tell it to recognise
> me over the network using ssh? etc. Because it has taken a long time to get
> the programs set up right, I'd rather not have to start afresh and reload
> everything (I'd be bound to forget something vital!!!).  Thanks,

Not asking for a password: where does it actually ask? Does the BIOS ask for the password? If so, you need to turn off password-on-boot in the BIOS. Is lilo asking for a password? (Unlikely) You need to sort out your booting process :). Do you mean the login: prompt? No, you can't turn that off, and you don't need to. Remember, that's just allowing you to login and do things. That doesn't mean the machine is sitting there doing nothing.

I presume you have ssh installed already? If not, go and get the OpenSSH rpms from somewhere and install them. You may need to 'chkconfig --level 345 ssh on', although that shouldn't be necessary. sshd will then start up whenever you enter runlevel 3 or above (i.e., when you boot up), and you will be able to login via ssh as you would do via a local console (same user id, same password, etc.)

To stop the machine complaining about not having a keyboard on bootup, go into the BIOS, and find the 'halt on errors' or similar selector. Set it so that it doesn't halt on a keyboard error - usually, 'floppy' and 'ram' will be the other options available. Don't worry about the monitor - you can plug and unplug that as you like. The keyboard is a little trickier, but generally you can plug and uplug those as you like. Sometimes you might need to plug/unplug a couple of times before it is usable again.

I presume also the question about passwords was so you could get the software running on it's own. The Linux equivilent of autoexec.bat is roughtly /etc/rc.d/rc.local, and you can add the commands you want to run to the end of the script. Make sure to pop a '&' on the end, or the script will wait for them to finish before continuing, which is not what you want. The other method is to make a script and put it in /etc/rc.d/init.d/, which is the better route. Try looking at /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd, or similar, if you have it, it may look a little strange at first, but it will soon make sense. Then, you can use the 'chkconfig' tool to start / stop your software as you please, which is a little nicer.

HTH,

Alex.
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