[K12OSN] Remote Management Problems

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 07:18, Noel Corbett wrote:
> What i'd like to know is can i somehow get the emerge process to run in the 
> background so that i can disconnect from the machine and keep it running.  I 
> live about 50km away from the school and only go in occasionally to perform 
> various tasks if I could do these updates from home I'd be a happy man.

There are a couple of simple ways to run single commnands or scripts
that allow you disconnect.  One is:
nohup 'command' &
which will redirect output to a file named nohup.out if you don't
specifically redirect it yourself and continue in the background
ignoring any hangup signals.  You can connect back later to view
or tail the file to check the results.
Another is
at now
  ..type in command
end with <ctl>-D as the first character on a line (standard unix
end-of-file).
This uses the scheduling mechanism (you could just as easily say
at now + 2 hours
or some other time interval to delay ths start) but is easier than
setting up a cron job because it saves and restores your environment
(PATH, working directory, uid, etc.) to match when you issue the
command.

There is also 'screen' which can allow you to disconnect and reconnect
without stopping the running programs if you are in character mode
or vncserver (started by hand, not the way k12ltsp does it
automatically), or x0rfbserver for graphic mode.  Or, for a slightly
different approach if you have access to a windows box on site you
can run a vnc server there.  This can be handy to hold together a
screen of several putty windows executing things on several machines
each of which may be rebooted at some step in the process.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com