On Mon, 14 Aug 2006, Erik Laxdal wrote:
Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
Back in the day (read: before the latest firefox update), I used to be able to ssh to a remote box, run 'firefox -local', and have that box fire up its own firefox session even if I was running firefox on the system from I which I sshed. Those days seem to be gone. No matter what I try, if I've got firefox running on my local desktop, the remote firefox command just fires off another instance of the local firefox session.
I've got several boxes running monitoring daemons reporting via http only to the localhost, so this was a handy feature for me. Is there any official way to get it back? If not, I guess I'll have to hack a 'localfirefox' script that doesn't do the nasty mozilla-xremote-client trick.
Ah, progress... *sigh*
As an alternative solution, why don't you take advantage of ssh's port forwarding ability and use just your local copy of firefox to access the web server as if you were local to the box. When you connect to the remote box, use something like:
ssh -L 8080:localhost:80 remoteboxThen on your local box's copy of firefox point the url to:
http://localhost:8080/This should (assuming the network is slower than gigabit) provide you with the fastest firefox response and use less resources on the remote systems. There are other possible benefits such as, with multiple ssh sessions and different port redirects (8081, 8082, ...) you could monitor daemons (different boxes) from different tabs in a single firefox window.
The one caveat with this is if you are using virtual hosts on the web server, further tweaks to the local hosts file and the local firefox url will be required.
It's probably easier to use
ssh -D 1080 remotebox
and then configure localhost:1080 as your Socks server in firefox. Or you could use proxy extension that allows you to switch from proxy server with a single click.
This allows you to use different Socks servers on different ports and switch between them using an extension.
Kind regards, -- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]