from the linux geek - screen
I should x-post this all over the geek world but as with most things geek, it's hard to find anyone who cares. People are either all "been there done that" or they're all "Why would I want to do that?".
I'm enthusiastic about this though because it's something I've needed and should have learned long ago. I should be doing my Spanish homework, but instead I got off my butt and finally learned the basics of how to use screen. It took me all of about 10 minutes.
Like all things *nix, it's powerful, arcane, and potentially hazardous although not really potentially destructive.
Briefly, I'll tell you what I did:
Sitting downstairs in my dining room in front of my laptop, I used ssh to connect to the computer upstairs over our wifi network and open a session. Ssh is on all flavors of Unix, Linux and BSD including, I think, Mac OS. It's also available in a windows application called Putty, which means this will work one way but not both from a machine running windoze (but what fun would that be?). The MSU is actually looking at real estate ads on the internet on the same machine that I remotely logged into and has no idea that we're both actually using it at the same time. If I wanted to be mean, I could start randomly killing her processes. Can you do that with Windoze?
But wait, there's more!
Thanks to screen, I can log on, start one or more processes (in this case, some bittorrent downloads), detach my session, shutdown my laptop, and the process will keep running. The MSU has no idea I was even there, much less that I'm now running two processes, totally absentee, on the machine she's sitting in front of.
Dare I say it again? Do this with Windoze.
Now, I think you might be able to do this with Mac OS but I can't be sure until my new toy arrives. If it turns out that I can't, my shiny new macbook is highly likely to be schooled in the way of the Ubuntu!
Now, If I can figure out how to get around the fact that I don't have a fixed IP address, oh the goofing off I'll be able to do from work!
I'm enthusiastic about this though because it's something I've needed and should have learned long ago. I should be doing my Spanish homework, but instead I got off my butt and finally learned the basics of how to use screen. It took me all of about 10 minutes.
Like all things *nix, it's powerful, arcane, and potentially hazardous although not really potentially destructive.
Briefly, I'll tell you what I did:
Sitting downstairs in my dining room in front of my laptop, I used ssh to connect to the computer upstairs over our wifi network and open a session. Ssh is on all flavors of Unix, Linux and BSD including, I think, Mac OS. It's also available in a windows application called Putty, which means this will work one way but not both from a machine running windoze (but what fun would that be?). The MSU is actually looking at real estate ads on the internet on the same machine that I remotely logged into and has no idea that we're both actually using it at the same time. If I wanted to be mean, I could start randomly killing her processes. Can you do that with Windoze?
But wait, there's more!
Thanks to screen, I can log on, start one or more processes (in this case, some bittorrent downloads), detach my session, shutdown my laptop, and the process will keep running. The MSU has no idea I was even there, much less that I'm now running two processes, totally absentee, on the machine she's sitting in front of.
Dare I say it again? Do this with Windoze.
Now, I think you might be able to do this with Mac OS but I can't be sure until my new toy arrives. If it turns out that I can't, my shiny new macbook is highly likely to be schooled in the way of the Ubuntu!
Now, If I can figure out how to get around the fact that I don't have a fixed IP address, oh the goofing off I'll be able to do from work!