Since I got some positive reenforcement for my posting on Nagios I’ll go ahead and point to this posting on screen; which I use as well. I use screen on headless servers, a lot.
Screen is much lighter than what I used to do. I’d run an X server on the headless machines with an in memory virtual display device. On that server I’d run a XEmacs to which I would typically connect using gnuclient. Occationally I’d connect to the X server using VNC. The nice thing about this approach is you can run a rich visual display of the server’s status in the memory resident X server and pop it up on demand.
HA! I see that Justin Mason has some screen tricks as well.
I love screen. I use it every day.
In case you are interested in TiVo hacking, here’s a binary for screen that will run on a TiVo Series 2:
http://marc.abramowitz.info/archives/2004/12/04/gnu-screen-for-tivo-series-2/
I love screen and I think it use under-recognized. It’s kind of hard to explain/sell what it does. Very useful for flaky connections or for continuing a session started at work from home.
http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000141.html
Good timing 😉 yep, I’ve been finding screen really useful recently, purely as this kind of session-saving proxy.
Screen is by far the most unknown of the ‘master’ applications under unix . Nothing has matched it for usefulness, stability, and general “This is so simple, it’s perfect” applicativeness (is that a word?). I know folks who have built entire desktop systems around screen.
‘screen’ + ssh (particularly in tunnelling) so far are unmatched in the Windows world.