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7. About RedHat 6.0

This kit will install on a RedHat 6.0, and using a RedHat 6.0 CD. There are some problems however with rh6.0 and xterminals in general. For RedHat, 6.0 is the first release where they are pushing Linux as a graphical workstation. They decide to go for security and make our life difficult :-(

Note: Some redhat 6.0 updates make some of this stuff irrelevant.

7.1 The font server (xfs)

On rh6, the xfs font server is running by default. Cool! One less thing to configure. Not so cool. xfs operates as a network server on port 7100. For unknown reason (to me), RedHat decide not to trust xfs on the security side. They did various things

The easiest solution I have found was to run an xfs server from redhat 5.2. They will run side by side.

The real solution is to fix the code so it can be disable (TCP support) from the config, so X terminals users are happy camper. Further adding to the code some network access control would make RedHat people happy I guess.

(I have not reviewed the xfs server in the rh6 updates, so can't comment about the fix they did for now).

7.2 The updated font server

There is an update for xfs available from ftp://updates.redhat.com/6.0/i386/XFree86-xfs-3.3.3.1-52.i386.rpm. It fixes the problem outline above. To use it with X terminals, there is some little work to do:

Edit the file /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs and change the port option from -1 to 7100. Restart the service by doing

        /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart
        

Then edit the file /etc/X11/XF86Config and change the fontpath line like this

    FontPath   "unix/:7100"
        

Do that while X is not running (or at least when you are at the graphical login prompt on the server).

Once update, if X was running, kill it (killall X) and it will restart with the new setting.

7.3 The gnome display manager (gdm)

gdm is the nice thing that provide the cute graphical login prompt. Unfortunatly, gdm on rh6.0 is not network aware and won't offer its graphical login to X terminals. I could not found the reason for that, although I suspect that the same logic applied as with xfs (close unneeded network access).

Well, in fact, gdm is very network aware with nice access control feature. But I could not make it work over the network. Odd!

The solution here is easy, but could be better. Just replace the link /etc/X11/prefdm from /usr/bin/gdm to /usr/X11R6/bin/xdm. You will get the familiar (ugly) X login prompt, working on the console as well as X terminal. Execute the following command

        cd /etc/X11
        ln -sf /usr/X11R6/bin/xdm prefdm
        

You can also use kdm (K display manager) which looks nice and do work over the network.

        cd /etc/X11
        ln -sf /usr/bin/kdm prefdm
        

7.4 The NFS server

There is a bug in the script /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs. When you do a restart on the NFS server after a configuration change, the new /etc/exports is not read. The exportfs command is used without the -r option. The proper code should read

        reload)
            /usr/sbin/exportfs -r
            touch /var/lock/subsys/nfs
            ;;
        


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