Andrew Hull wrote:
I do exactly what you suggest. I keep a minimal X install on most of my headless machines -- I still boot run level 3. This lets me "ssh -X" to a machine and execute graphical commands, and up the come on my local Linux workstation.
Occasionally, this is very useful for me. For instance: I have some of these headless boxen scattered throughout the network. With this, I can launch firefox on a remote machine. This lets me test viewing resources from various points of the network; great for security policy testing.
What you're talking about works great too. I have gkrellm installed on these machines too, as well as the servers. Cacti is great for looking at trending or historical data. But to see what a server is up to _right now_ I fire up gkrellm this way (along with things like "tail 'cat /var/log/_something_'" and htop) to see what the machine is up to right then and there.
gkrellm is available from the wonderful rpmforge repo, but I'm sure Conky would work too.
You can take this one step further by picking an always-on host where you run freenx. Then connect with the NX client from www.nomachine.com and start a desktop where you can park long running jobs like monitoring tools (including remote X connections or a bunch of xterms with ssh connections elsewhere). Then you can disconnect the NX client and reconnect later with everything still running. The connection can be from any linux/windows/mac NX client and you get very good remote performance even over low bandwidth connections - and unlike normal X connections, losing the connection doesn't kill the processes.