I've had a look in the FAQ, and on the WWW, but can't seem to find a
good answer on how to achieve what I need to do, so I'm turning to the
fine folks on the port-{pmax,alpha} mailing lists. :-)

I have a DECstation 3100 and a DEC 3000/300LX, both running stock NetBSD
1.4.  The 3000/300 is headless, but is the beef of the two systems, so I
want to use my 3100 mainly as an X terminal to the 3000/300 (but also be
able to open up X sessions on the 3100 occasionally).  (*Ideally* what
I'd like to be able to do is to have a chooser pop up on the 3100 of all
the machines on my subnet that will allow me to open an X session on,
and choose from the list, but that is just icing on the cake.  What I
most need is to get the 3100 acting as an X terminal for the 3000/300.)

I seem to be having two main problems:

1) If I run xdm on the 3100, I get partial, short-lived success in
opening X sessions on other machines.  Typically, the X session will
start up and then die within a few seconds, e.g., using the "-query"
option to /usr/X11R6/bin/X in the Xservers entry for :0 on the 3100 will
pop up a login widget from the remote machine, and even let me enter my
username and password, but the session dies shortly thereafter.  (With
some remote hosts it will die even before I can enter anything.)

2) I can't get the 3000/300 to pop up a chooser with any valid hosts
listed.  When using "-indirect AlphaBox" (where "AlphaBox" is the
3000/300) I get a chooser displayed, but all it has listed is "list" in
the hosts listing.  Using "-indirect DU4AlphaBox" to point, instead, to
a different alpha running Digital Unix 4.0D, pops up a chooser (same
look 'n' feel) except valid hosts are listed.  Similarly, "-indirect
AIXbox" to an AIX box running CDE pops up a CDE-style chooser with
correct hosts.

If I don't run xdm on the 3100, and, instead log in as root and manually
start X via "/usr/X11R6/bin/X -indirect AIXbox" or "/usr/X11R6/bin/X
-query AlphaBox" it works as I want (with a chooser in the
former case, and a dedicated X session to the 3000/300 in the latter),
except a) it's a hassle to do it this way, and, b) I can't start an X
session on the 3100 itself.

Am I missing something obvious, here?  All my xdm config files are 1.4
out-of-the-box, except for /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers: on the
3000/300 everything is commented out (as it is headless), and on the
3100, X on :0 has the "-indirect" option.  Xdm is enabled on the
3000/300 and was on the 3100. (It's now disabled, and I'm running X
manually right now, so I can get something closer to what I want that
works.)

I get the same results whether on the 3100 I'm using kdm or the xdm that
comes with NetBSD/pmax 1.4 (except kdm also does some logging via
syslog).  The most common error in /var/log/xdm on both the 3100 and
3000/300 is of the form:

xdm error (pid 6715): fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe)
xdm error (pid 6719): fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe)
xdm error (pid 6723): fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe)
xdm error (pid 6727): fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe)
xdm error (pid 6731): fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe)
xdm error (pid 6735): fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe)
xdm error (pid 6739): fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe)
xdm error (pid 6743): fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe)
xdm error (pid 6747): fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe)
[[etc.]]

although several of the following also appeared in /var/log/messages on
the 3100:

Jul 20 17:54:00 3100 kdm[274]: WARNING: keyboard on display :0 could not be secured 
Jul 20 17:54:11 3100 kdm[282]: WARNING: keyboard on display :0 could not be secured
[[etc.]]


Has anyone got a working chooser list on either pmax or alpha and a
working xdm (w/XDMCP)?

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul@gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"I don't live today; maybe tomorrow..."
	--- James Marshall Hendrix