I'm wanting to switch my server machine, located at Washu in St Louis, to Linux. Right now it's on XP and I use a program called Remote Administrator to do remote desktop to it so I can have full control over the computer. If I switch the box to linux, is there some program I can use to control it from here, on my windows machine, in the same way?

Yes, you can. Can't give you much more info though because it was earlier this year. I ended up configuring it through Gnome and using XWin32 to log into my laptop that had Linux on it. I don't remember it being terribly difficult to set up. The Dell's in CS used to have it set up too. Not sure if you can still remotely log into them with a desktop though.

Hope that helps.

Raw X can be very painful over low-bandwidth links. Using a SSH tunnel with compression helps a bit, but it's still a bandwidth hog. You might want to look into VNC. They have clients and servers for most mainstream OSes.

There's a few different things you can do, but the most effective (and resource friendly) way would be to just administrate through ssh on the CLI.

Better way of putting it: Why waste resources on X when no-one will be needing/using it? I know it's not the answer you're looking for, but it would be beneficial to run it that way.

Note: I am a linux newbie. "ssh on the CLI" scares me.

Edit: I do know what X is, though..

I strongly agree with heretic^. Whatever use you need your remote systems to do, be it administration or general use, is best done over a remote shell. It'll put hair on your chest. Builds character.

If you really, really, need to use X, though, you should look into dxpc (homepage) to help cut the fat. Tunneling over ssh is always good policy, too, but eats up processing cycles encrypting and imposes a killer latency for anything very graphical. Edit: I guess there's also NX (dev page) and LBX (HOW-TO), but I really don't know that much about them.

If WU was on MORENet, I'd almost be willing to run X without the ssh wrapper. Almost, since there's practically no "untrusted" hosts on the MORENet backbone. Unfortunately, WU is on SONET, which sends your packets far and wide across the nation. No unencrypted communication for me, sorry.

Heh. A server at WU? Whatsit doing up there? Trying to run Seek42?

No, it's running a Ventrilo server and a UT2004 server since the network here at UMR is crapass when it comes to serving things to the outside.

Once I install linux on the machine, I'll look into the stuff you guys mentioned or something. I guess it'll be a learning experience for me.

and if you really don't want to try tunneling X through ssh, or just cli through ssh (acronym hell)............

VNC!