My project - a brief overview

Well, all is well and good, I've looked at various bits of infrastructure and I have to complete my literature review for a few books on software I know I don't need now (like a book on beowulf) and came up with a project.

As mentioned before I have looked into X11 forwarding - but my requirements as set by myself is to make a "high availability - load balanced cluster for X programs."

The library - and a good days work

Today has been a successful weekend of research, and actually putting that research into practice. I have been studying X-Windows and the X11 protocol, and trying to implement my own X-Windows server. To be honest I was really stumped as to how to get my ubuntu machine to display xclock, but with a lot of effort, and a little help from my friends and wiki's all over the google world I got it working.

The basics of it are that an SSH connection to the server with the X programs on it, then by issuing the command "xclock &" will ensure that the "xclock" program appears on the client OS, but ultimately it is run on the X server.

Testing:

I wanted to ensure that I was not running the "xclock" on the client OS, so by opening up a new terminal and typing "ps -ef" I found that "xclock" was importantly NOT in the process list, and running the same command (ps -ef) on the X server sure enough xclock was been run!

Quite simple really! But here's where the fun begins - failover and load balancing - I've had an idea with further SSH tunneling - but there are some vital flaws. I will be presenting my findings to my Project tutor so I will see how it goes...

I've also got some light reading from the library: SSH the secure shell - its an O'reilly book so should be good, and a book on Windows server clustering.