Alright. Forgotten by me. Sometimes the extreme coolness that is ’nix slides right by.

Xnest allows you to “nest” X sessions and can act as both a client and server. I wanted to get remote X connections working to my OpenBSD firewall/router from my Debian workstation. GDM, XDMCP and Xnest to the rescue.

Steps

• Install GDM on the OpenBSD box.

pkg_add -i gdm

• Enable XDMCP in /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf. Make sure you lock down port 177! Unencrypted remote X sessions are not safe, and you don’t want the unwashed masses poking around your X server.

#stuff up here
[xdmcp]
#stuff. . .
Enable=true

• Start gdm on the OpenBSD box, and add it to /etc/rc.local.

So we’ve got GDM running on the OpenBSD box, accepting XDMCP connections. Now we need to get the remote host ready.

• Install Xnest on the remote machine.

aptitude install xnest

• Connect!

Xnest :10 -query 10.0.0.1

where “:10” is some unused display on the host running XDMCP and “10.0.0.1” is its IP address.

You should have a GDM login screen. Huzzah! You can specify a specific height/width via the Xnest’s -geometry option, among about a billion other options. Xnest and XDMCP are both ridiculously flexible. I barely notice lagtime over wired or wireless connections. Very nice.

More Info

• Xnest
• OpenBSD
• Debian