On Mon, 23 Jun 1997, Amitai Schlair wrote:

> At college next year I want to use my IIci as a headless server. Dorms
> are small, and I already have a 7100 with a 17" monitor... I was
> thinking I could bring just the IIci itself (with Ethernet card and
> NetBSD installed, but no monitor, keyboard, or mouse) to school,
> daisy-chain it to the 7100 with an EtherWave adapter, and administer the
> NetBSD system over a null modem cable from the 7100 via ZTerm or
> PPP&Telnet.

Sounds good so far, I have a headless IIci, I have a keyboard and mouse
attached, but no monitor, also have an asante ethernet card and I ususally
log in from one of my NeXT's.  I usually just keep and extra keyboard
and mouse on my IIci so that if I compile a new kernel and it don't work,
I can just plug a monitor into the IIci and change the booter, but if you
have a power mac you can just shut that down and use it's keyboard mouse
and monitor when you need to.
 
> I've read in the FAQ that a fairly cheap SVGA adapter can allay NetBSD
> by simulating the presence of a monitor. Does a IIci (internal video)
> need one of these? If so, what kind and where to get one? I have a
> Portrait monitor and card as well, BTW...

Yes just buy the adaptor, this is what I do and it works great.
If you are really cheap you can go out on the net and find the apple
sense code documentation in a  FAQ somewhere, and use that to fake a
monitor.  Depending on what kind of monitor you want to fake you
just short or diode connect a few pins.  

> Do EtherWave adapters "just work", or do they require MacOS drivers?
> (meaning they wouldn't work in my config...)

If this is a tranciever technology it should just work, as the the
NIC hardware that MacBSD uses won't see a difference, but I am not familer
with EtherWave.
 
> I've never used X before, so this isn't really a major point of
> contention for me, but could I get color X on the 7100 this way? If so,
> how?

Color X should work for you because you will not be useing the IIci as an
X server. NOTE the X terminology here, in X parlance the machine with the 
monitor is the server, since it servers display capabilities to others
even thought we usually think of the server as where the program runs.
So: what you do is get X windows software for your PMac, MacX should do if
it is still around and supports Pmac, Exodus should also do, now in the
X sense the Pmac is the server.  In a command line on your IIci (either via
telnet rlogin or an xterm) you run a program lets say you want to run
xterm you type "xterm -DISPLAY fobar:0.0" this runs the xterm program on
the IIci but the window is opened on foobar.  foobar can be a FQDN or
a simple DNS resolavble name or an IP address depending on how your net
is configured.  It is also possible to set environment variables so that
the redirection of X windows is done automatically.  Do a man X for
information
 
mail me with any further questions

---------
Christopher R. Bowman
crb@Glue.umd.edu
My home page