Running WD-Linux remotely (headless)

Now that I have WD-Linux pretty well tweaked and the memory leak at a manageable rate (using 5.5g), I wanted to run it on a Linux server box remotely 24/7.

Johan’s note mentioned a similar setup but I thought I would update that with a step-by-step for my Suse installation.
Previously my remote connection to the server box used a VNC client for a user-login session, which was fine except WD stopped when I closed VNC (logged out). So the solution is to use a remote-desktop connection instead.

As in the earlier post, I also want to do this totally remote by setting it up from a SSH console login.
As with most things in Linux there are lots of ways to make it happen, I just followed what Johan did and other articles about vnc remote-desktop. (see www.linux-journal.com/article/5499)
These notes are for Suse10.1 but should be similar for most others.

  1. Remote Login to your USER (not root) account on the Linux server using SSH console login.

  2. Before running vncserver you will probably want to change the default window manager.
    In your user folder ‘.vnc’, is a file ‘xstartup’ that has twm as the window manager. Change that to kde (or your preference). The last line should read “startkde &” instead of “twm &”.

  3. Start ‘vncserver’ with that command. If this is the first time you are running it you will be asked to create a separate remote-desktop password.
    When vncserver starts it will say “New Desktop is ‘servername’:‘n’”. Make note of the number ‘n’.
    ( eg: n was 2 in my case)

  4. Next redirect the X output to that new display number with, “export DISPLAY=:2” (use whatever ‘n’ was in step 3)

  5. Change to your wdisplay folder and start WD-Linux with “nohup ./GoWeather.sh &”.
    Wd will run but you will not see it from here. (You can verify its running with “ps ax | grep WeatherD”)

  6. With WD running in the background you are free to disconnect your ssh session.

  7. Whenever you want to look at the WD-Linux output just use a VNC client to connect to the remote-desktop with that display number. Your VNC client would have parameters of “serveripaddress:n”.
    When you connect you will be prompted for the remote-desktop password (see step 3) and presented with the full X display of that desktop with WD-Linux.

When your VNC client disconnects (not logging out), WD stays running on the server, available anytime you want to look at it or make changes. Most of the time I watch WD-Live instead, which is another great product.

I noted that remote-desktop provided better resolution (at 1024x768) than using a normal VNC login session.
I can actually read the text in the CWOP setup screen using this method.

The only thing better than this would be WD running as a daemon but for now this does the trick.

Cheers,
Ron