Screen sharing without the screen

I run a research group at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in the College of Engineering. All the computers in my research group are Macs: half a dozen iMacs, a dual G5, a Macbook, Powerbook Pro, a mini. For power computing I have an 8-node, 3gig, Macpro named sandman. I want to be able to use sandman as a server for the other machines. For example, I want to be able to log into sandman from the iMac, chuck, in my office and execute MacOS software running on sandman but displaying on chuck.

I know that I can do this with Screen Sharing. However, there are times when one of my students is using sandman directly and I don't want to interrupt their session.

Now, if I ssh into sandman using X11, I can set my display to chuck and successfully execute X11 softeware on sandman but displaying on chuck. I want to be able to do the same thing with MacOS software, e.g. Safari, XCode, or Parallels Desktop.

Is there a way to do this? Is there a way to do this, not necessarily through ssh but some other route?

thanks in advance for the help and advice,
dan

ManWithAPlan said:

I am not sure exactly how to do this, and I have a similar need actually. Your mentioning of X-windows is interesting to me. I had used it once in a previous life, though I don't recall all the advantages or how to leverage it. So, I have it running here now, but how do I get it to display back an app from another Mac on the network? I am SSH'd into the other Mac, but don't know how to set the display parameters. Can you assist?

I am running OSX Server on this machine, and OSX client on others.

Thanks very very much.

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What I am currently able to do is this:
1) I'm currently sitting in front of my laptop hank
2) I open an X11 window and ssh into my Macpro sandman - ssh sandman
3) Type "export DISPLAY=hank:0.0" in the X11 window, which points the sandman X11 apps back to hank's display. You might have to use the explicit
ip address if /etc/hosts doesn't have an entry for hank.
4) Run any of the X11 apps that are in the directory /usr/X11/bin such as xterm, xeyes, etc.

What I want to be able to do is run MacOS apps, such as Photoshop, Parallels Desktop, Safari, whatever, on sandman but display them on hank. I know I can do this using Screen Sharing but that means only one person at a time can use sandman. I was hoping there was a way that multiple users could be running virtual desktops on sandman at the same time.

dan

corbywan said:

Just thinking out loud here, no real experience in trying this.

What if you created multiple user account on sandman and had them logged in on sandman. Would it be possible to have a screen sharing session going with a user that is logged in but not active on sandman? I suspect it isn't or else we'd have been hearing a lot more about it. I would bet that screen sharing is a service of the machine, not based on the user logged in.

It sounds to me like you are looking to do something like a terminal server. To my knowledge Mac's don't have a way of doing this, at least not in the way you want to do it with the MacOS and all that prettiness. But I could be totally wrong and would love to be corrected on this one.

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I don't think it is possible to do multiple screen sharing sessions. When I screen share, I always get whatever is currently on the screen of sandman. Now don't get me wrong, screen sharing is a great app, but it isn't what I'm
looking for.

You are correct, I'm looking to do a terminal X11 server, but also being able to execute native mac apps, not just the x11 apps. I guess it wouldn't be an X11 server but the whole Darwin(?) server.

Do all vnc apps requite a physical screen under MacOS?

Thanks for the suggestions! I will have to check out both OSXvnc and Aqua Connect when I get back to the office next week.