-----Original Message-----
From: Harold L Hunt II [SMTP:huntharo@msu.edu]
Sent: Friday, November 15, 2002 7:12 PM
To: cygwin-xfree@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: Preventing X server resets
Peter,
Let me rephrase your question and ask you if it makes sense:
``If I am talking on the phone to my mother and she unplugs her phone,
can I just continue talking to her?''
Yes, but if Dad is on the other extension at the same time I would expect to
be able to continue talking to him :-)
Perhaps I wasn't clear in my question. I know that if a machine is rebooted
then any X clients running on it will be lost. As an aside, I also know
that if a machine running an X server is rebooted then the server is lost,
and there's typically no way to tell the clients where to reconnect to; the
RandR extension will apparently change this in the future.
However, I have X clients running on many machines and all displaying on the
same server. If most of these hosts go down then the clients on that host
are lost, but the X server keeps running and the other clients are
unaffected. If the host I logged into with XDMCP goes down, the X server
resets and kicks off all the other clients which are otherwise fine. It's
this behavior that I wish to avoid.
The answer is no. You have established a connection with a server that
is supposed to manage your X session... if that server fails, or if the
connection to it is unreliable, then you X Session is terminated.
Unfortunately, the way the system is designed is that applications you
launch from your X session are managed by the remote XDMCP machine... if
that machine goes down there is no way to transfer control of those
applications to another machine.
I don't believe that this is true. As I understand it, X11 clients connect
directly to the X11 server. Checking with netstat, I see that there are no
connections between the host that I logged into with XDMCP and another host
running an xterm.
I know that what I asked is possible in general, since an X server called
PC-Xware does it. When XDMCP goes away it asks something like "Your XDM
session has ended. Would you like to reset the X server?", and if you say
no you can just carry on working. I hoped that I'd be able to do the same
thing with XFree86.
3) If you can't do anything about the machine or the network, then you
need to adjust your quality-of-service expectations.
Perhaps this is the best suggestion. I can usually run a session for weeks
or months without incident, so perhaps I'm asking too much :-)
Alternatively, it occurs to me that I could start my session using rlogin
rather than XDMCP. Fiddly, but it should do the trick.