On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 02:05:19PM +0100, Zafer Aydogan wrote:
<snip>

> Heja Mailing-List,
>
> Unfortunately, I still can't scroll up on the console or any of the ttyE*
> Terminals.
> Is there a way to do that, or is it planned to be done ?
>
> The point is, that it is absolutely unflexible, if you get an error
> during compiling of a package and you can't scroll up, to see what it
> was.  Ok, sure I could | tee up every command in a seperate file, but
> as I said, it's not flexible.

Someone else already mentioned this, and I'll second it, with more info,
use screen.  It's in your hated ;-) pkgsrc under misc/screen, but as
also mentioned, you can get the binary packages.  Its GNU, so there's no
binary redistribution limits outside of the standard GNUish stuff.

With screen, you have configurable scroll-back, as big as you want it.
You have lots of virtual terminals, I think with the default compile,
you get something like 30 of them.  You can cut & paste between them,
using simple keyboard commands.  You can start a job at home, detach
from your screen session, go to work, re-attach, your stuff is still
running.

You can share a screen session with someone else, either both on the
same terminal, or not.  We had this at one of my previous gigs, a screen
session that was logged into all of the major systems on the production
side of the network, both sysadmins connected to the same screen
session, either of us could quickly jump between hosts to fix/modify
things, or watch what the other one was doing, w/o having to get up and
look over the other's shoulder, made it easier to say, "hey, let me
drive for a second," and the other would just take over typing.

I've been running screen for 10+ years, I can't imagine having to manage
networks and systems as large as I have without it.  Combine screen with
ssh, ssh-agents, and the perl gsh utilities modified to use ssh instead
of rsh, you can quickly get a lot done on lots of systems, with minimal
effort.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson@bl.org