[meeveryday]

Hi all,

I have been scouring the web to try and find an answer to this but as I am quite new to the ssh thing, I am not even sure I am asking the right question.

I have a debian server that is imperative that stays as low resource as possible. Hence, when it boots it goes to the console and does not startx. Actually it just sits waiting for the User and PW.

During the boot process I am going to start an app that I want to be able to ssh in to see. I am getting that going at the moment and running that the init.d way.

So my question is, can I assign an app a DISPLAY level or something that will correspond with an ssh command so I can see it remotely?

Or if anyone has any better ideas, i'm open. I just don't really want to startx or a window manager or anything like that because of need to keep resource usage low.

TIA ALOT!!

[smolloy]

Can you tell us what app you're interested in observing via ssh?

[meeveryday]

It will be a terminal session running a rendering program. I need to be able to see the ever changing output to watch for errors and the like.

[smolloy]

Can you redirect the output from this program to a file, which you can then read at your leisure, or watch using

tail -f outputfile.txt

?

[meeveryday]

Hmm that sounds like a simple idea, I like that! Is there a command you know of to pipe the terminal session to a text file?

[smolloy]

When you run the app, run it like this

application-name >> ~/outputfile.txt

(Obviously replacing "application-name" with the name of your app!)

This is called redirection -- there'll be a ton of information on google on it.

[meeveryday]

ok that seems to be working but it is not outputting live if you know what I mean. It only updates the txt file after it is ended? But when I first tried it I am sure it was . any ideas?

[smolloy]

Redirection should happen live. If you view the file with the following, you should be able to watch it update live,

tail -f ~/outputfile.txt

[meeveryday]

Yeah so I have tried that but I think the problem is that the redirection is only outputing certain things, and not everything and the program that is running must work in such a way that it does not go to a new line. or something?? i'm struggling to find out why really? Any ideas?? tia

[i92guboj]

Try to redirect both stdout and stderr:

progname >/var/log/logfile.txt 2>&1

That should put everything that the program spits out to the console into logfile.txt

Then you can open ssh like this:

ssh user@server 'tail -f /var/log/logfile.txt'

If the program is going to run in X in graphical mode or something then you will need vpn or something like that, I guess. It all depends on what exactly do you need.