Re: Preventing X server resets

[Harold L Hunt II <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

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?''

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.

You basically have a system problem here:
1) Take steps to stop the machine from crashing or being rebooted (this 
may involve convincing your sysadmin to change his ways, via a baseball 
bat if necessary)

2) Remedy the network connection problems between you and the server. 
There should not be such problems, and the X protocol generally deals 
quite well with long-distance connections.  For example, I XDMCP into my 
home machine which sits on a cable modem that has 256 kbits/sec 
upstream... my connection paths to this machine go through many 
thousands of miles of Internet links before arriving at my laptop 
machine, yet the connection is responsive and reliable.  If you are on a 
local network and you have problems, then you have some inherent flaw in 
your network that must be resolved.

3) If you can't do anything about the machine or the network, then you 
need to adjust your quality-of-service expectations.

With that being said, you may be able to alter your working habits, such 
as opening remote applications via ssh with X forwarding... this will 
tend to be a little less resource intensive that opening a full XDMCP 
session on the remote machine 
(http://xfree86.cygwin.com/docs/ug/using-remote-apps.html#using-remote-apps-ssh).

I hope that clarifies the way X works and I hope it gives you a few 
other ideas to try.

Harold

Oliver, Peter wrote:

> I'm using XDMCP for my session, from where I run X applications on
> various different servers.  If the machine I logged onto with XDMCP is
> rebooted, or suffers network difficulties, the X server resets and I
> loose my whole session.  I would prefer the X server and it's remaining
> clients to continue running, so that I can just start a window manager
> on a different box and carry on working.  Is there some way to prevent
> this reset from happening?  I gave the -noreset option a try but it made
> no difference.
>
>