Front Row and VNC Question

[trumb1mj]

Do you guys know if the following is possible?

I am using my mini for most of my movie and tv viewing. This kind of leaves me in a pickle in maintaining that machine. I want to be able to do maintenance through VNC and still use my mac front row capabilities. This may require a second login or 3rd party piece of software or something.. Not too sure, just wondering if you guys know a solution.

 

[plinden]

So, you want to remotely manage your media Mac Mini, is that right?

Yes, you can do that with screen sharing. But you're not going be able to simultaneously watch Front Row and other things that require the UI, since screen sharing just shows what the Mac is displaying at that moment. Why not leave such maintenance tasks for when no one's watching anything?

You can ssh in and do stuff with Terminal or mount the hard drive remotely and copy files to and from it.

 

[GimmeSlack12]

I use my Mini for the exact same thing Trumb. I use VNC with my iMac or iBook to do anything to the Mini that might need maintenance. I just turn on VNC in the Sharing Prefs (on my Mini), and then dial in my Mini's IP address in the "connect to" menu item under the Go menu. Or if you have Leopard you can use the Screen Sharing button that Plinden mentioned.

If I must do something to the Mini while it is being watched, I use SSH. Its a little messy but it gets the job done.
Any specifics that you aren't clear about?

 

[trumb1mj]

ssh is perfect for certain tasks

but sometimes you just need to vnc and it would be great to be able to do this without interrupting the media file that is being played.

There must be a way to specify a specific login while vnc'ing into a machine or something...

 

[GimmeSlack12]

There must be a way to specify a specific login while vnc'ing into a machine or something...

Sorry, there isn't. I mean think about it, how could that possibly work? No OS has a backdoor GUI that is hidden from the primary display/user. Or whatever you might call it.

To reduce the amount of VNC time I need on my Mini I have my Torrents program (Transmission) keep watch of a folder and then FTP new torrent files to that folder to begin new transfers. I use SSH to move files if so be it. What 'maintenance' do you need to do?

 

[trumb1mj]

Maybe not vnc

but in windows you can remote log in to a machine using different usernames and not interrupt the other session. In my experience, anything possible on a windows machine is possible on mac..

 

[GimmeSlack12]

but in windows you can remote log in to a machine using different usernames and not interrupt the other session. In my experience, anything possible on a windows machine is possible on mac..

Well, I can't say that I've ever tried that. All I can recommend is to setup another Account in System Preferences and give it a shot. Now I'm curious.

 

[trumb1mj]

I'm in a windows world at work right now so I can't test this but it seems doable one way or another. I will try it when I get home and post what I find.