Chapter 2. Remote GUI Connectivity

Hacks 10–19: Introduction

Networks are the backbone of most computing today. Even small businesses depend on internal networks of desktop computers and servers to deliver services such as email, file and directory sharing, access to internal and external web servers, and so on. For the system administrator, this means that you typically need to connect to different types of systems during the course of a day to perform different types of administrative tasks.

If your network is composed solely of Linux systems, you can use standard command-line tools such as ssh or telnet to connect to remote systems and get most of your work done, but let’s face it—it’s a graphical world nowadays. There are lots of great administrative tools out there that make it easier to do complex tasks that could easily be derailed by a typo in a long command line. And if you also administer Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X systems, you’ll need access to graphical tools that run on those systems, too.

This chapter primarily consists of hacks that make it easy to establish graphical connections to remote machines from a desktop system, enabling people to run graphical packages that are installed on those remote systems without leaving their chairs. It also provides a hack that tells you how to use Webmin, a centralized, web-based system administration utility that enables you to access multiple server resources from a single system and browser.

The hacks in this chapter aren’t just ...

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