text-only remote terminal viewer

picho · 02-16-2012, 04:49 PM

Hello people, is there any way to access a remote linux box only to view its display? (no X in there, text only)

I know I can use telnet or ssh, but beside of issuing commands I'd like to view the current status of the screen, for example, to check for error messages or cancel a running script or anything I'd do by sitting on its keyboard, but... done remotely. Can I?

Client can be GUI or text, but server has no GUI, text-only to work only in the running session (not to open new tty sessions).

Thanks for your help.

sycamorex · 02-16-2012, 04:54 PM

Not sure if that's what you want but 'screen' or 'tmux' could help you here.

picho · 02-16-2012, 05:15 PM

I'm not sure but I think both applications, screen and tmux, will allow you to create remote terminals and work on those remote terminals. I rather want to work on the current running terminal of the remote computer. The terminal created right after booting up (is that tty1?).

Put simply: the server boots up, and starts running an application which outputs to the screen. That computer doesn't have a physical monitor, so I want to remotely access it to watch what's going on in there.

cheesus · 02-17-2012, 03:03 PM

This sounds like you want to be able to connect to the console in case something bad happens to the machine.
But in such cases you can't rely on the machine's network config.
For this use case, several vendors sell "remote console switches", that connect to the machines' real VGA
and keyboard jacks, and send that over the wire to a console application.

That, or you meant something completely different :-)