SCREEN Tip

Looking at the pictures Alan just posted reminded me of a screen tip I
wanted to share.


When I was working at the Mars Space Flight Facility there were a few
computers I would constantly log into. I like lots of desktops ( in a
3x3 grid typically) and this results in a huge number of xterms. For
the first few months in such an interrupt driven environment I would
constantly lose the xterm I had a root shell into machine A or my
account on machine B. Ultimately I ended up accumulating lots of root
and other shells and they would be left around for days lost or worse,
accidentally typed 'sudo reboot' on the DHCP server.

I was looking at the screen manpage one day when it occurred to me that
it could be configured to auto-detach and be password protected. So, I
created a screenrc for each host, that would launch 2 root and 2 godber
ssh connections to the remote machine and would auto-detach after just a
few minutes of idle time. I set up an alias to launch screen with the
appropriate screenrc and a corresponding alias to reattach.

This meant that if I walked away from my desk, it would detach and
password protect the screen. Even better, when I returned to my desk I
didn't need to find which of 37 xterms the connection was in, I simply
reconnected in whatever xterm was handy and I picked up right where I
left off. Not only that, if I was REALLY in the middle of something and
found my self on the other side of the building, I could SSH back to my
desktop and reattach and type in that MAC address I had just looked up
or whatever.

Just thought I would mention it since I found it tremendously useful.

Austin
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