Sorry for the late summary, I was holding out for better answers...
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The original question:
What I would like to do is get as close to my work environment as
possible - at home. Unfortunately, this won't translate to spending less
time at work - but that's my problem.
What I have at work is a Sun SPARC 10 running openwindows & 4.1.3. I
also have a QBlazer (V.42 Bis) connected to it.
At home I can have a Sun 3/80 with a color monitor, and a small
(100Mb?) hard disk. I also have a Telebit QBlazer for it.
What is the best way to get this done? I know from the FAQ there is
XTerminal software available: Seth Robertson's Xkernel package... Is
this the best solution?
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From: hkatz@nucmed.NYU.EDU (Henry Katz)
According to the Xkernel 2.0 FAQ, no one has really made a 3/80 into
an x-terminal over ppp/slip. Please summarize results if successful.
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From: Dan Stromberg - OAC-DCS <strombrg@hydra.acs.uci.edu>
If you go with an X terminal config, that means everything you do, is
going to hit that slow serial connection... that may not be
unacceptable, but it's something to be aware of.
One way of decreasing the impact of that, would be to go for an X
terminal config, but to use a B&W X server on your color monitor...
approx 1/8th the data sounds like a good thing, in this case. It
still might be pretty pokey, but it might be worth a shot.
The Xkernel stuff on the net works fairly well; we use it on a number
of sun3's around UCI. I set up a slightly different one, that takes
filesystems (including X fonts) from the local hard disk, to minimize
impact on the net... you might want to do the same! It'd probably be
nicer than booting diskless over slip anyway. :)
Good luck. I hope you'll describe what you do in the end.
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From: kevin@uniq.com.au (Kevin Sheehan {Consulting Poster Child})
Yep - I'd set up PPP (MorningStar works well IMHO) and just run the X
stuff over the wire. Be warned that X applications throwing bitmaps
back and forth can take a while, but most X apps running on a 19.2K link
under PPP run fine. No need to make an Xkernel machine out of the 3/80,
I'd think that just X11R5 (instead of OW) to minimize memory and disk
usage would be sufficient.
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From: shandelm@jpmorgan.com (Joel Shandelman FIMS Information Systems -
I have a user that just converted from an NCD-15b with the Xremote proms
for compression to a SUn IPX with Morningstar's PPP product. He loves it.
If you're an avid emacs fan you might want to look at angeftp off the net
which ftp's the remore file and loads it locally into your emacs buffer
all behind the scenes. MST's PPP docs tells more about this product and
where to find it. PPP for each end cost $795 but it's well worth it.
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From: blymn@mulga.awadi.com.AU (Brett Lymn)
For a start do not use the internal serial ports on the Sparc 10 (and
maybe the Sun 3) coz Sun probably still do not provide hardware
handshaking for serial input (check the hardware manual, I may be
wrong). You *will* need hardware handshaking if you are going to run
the modems in v.42bis because the data rate through the link is highly
variable. BTW X stuff seems to compress nicely and using v.42bis does
make a big difference.
Secondly try very very hard to run your window manager locally and
just run X clients over the link, you will find the performance will
be much better. Even doing this expect your clients to be slow, I
have found that using a 14.4k v.42bis modem makes things bearable but
not blazingly fast. I have run Sun Net Manager over my slip link,
including a couple of large performance graphs. This runs ok but if
you try to use the slip link interactively at the same time you really
notice when snm updates the graphs.
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From: Kevin Cosgrove <solomon!kevinc@qiclab.uucp>
What I do is run SunOS 4.1.1_U1 on my Sun 3/50. Over that I
run X11R5 with the olwm window manager. This gives me
OpenWindows look & feel, without the performance penalty. It's
very nice on a Sun 3. Oh, this is at home. I run a Sparc at
work.
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From: bmecca@ralph.wea.com (Buddy Mecca)
Hummingbird Communications will soon offer a phone connect for X. Give them a call.
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From: David Fetrow <fetrow@biostat.washington.edu>
X11r6 should have a new protocol for use over serial lines based on the
the compression schemes come up with the PC X11 players. Until that's
available the best scheme I know of is use a (hack, ptui) PC X11 server
under MS-Windows or MS-DOS since they have nice compression schemes that
really speed things up plus local window managers, which also help.
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From: joey@q7.com (Joe Pruett)
you don't want to turn it into just an x terminal. in order to have decent
performance, you'll want to run as many local clients as possible (window
manager, xterm/shelltool, clock, etc.) and use telnet/rlogin for most
remote access. what i would suggest doing is this:
obtain x11r5, xview3.2, olvwm, and ppp from ftp.uu.net (or another ftp
server you like)
compile up everything for your sun3 (with the limited disk space you have,
you might have to do this somewhere else and transfer the binaries to home)
compile ppp for the sparc system at work.
spend a lot of time figuring out how ppp works and how to deal with ip
address assignment, routing, name service, etc.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:08:16 CDT