XDMCP over SSH - a better idea (hopefully)

[Vic Lee]

Hi,

Sorry I sent this email to xorg-devel but I realized that this should be
a feature discussion, not yet a development discussion... So I resend it
here.

Recently I want to implement XDMCP over SSH feature when doing my
project. I've done some research and understand that "XDMCP uses UDP
that natively cannot be tunnelled over SSH", however there's a
well-known workaound:

LOCAL$ ssh -X REMOTE Xephyr :1 -query localhost

which query XDMCP in a remote Xephyr, then to tunnel the Xephyr window
using X11 forwarding. However this is not working good enough for me
since (1) I don't want to ask users to install Xnest or Xephyr on SSH
server (2) Somehow the tunnelled Xephyr window won't recognize -parent
argument to embed into my app - it always create a top-level window;
well, this could be another bug but I don't want to waste my time
investigating on this, since now I came up with a better solution.

I would like to implement a new binary, let's temporarily call it
"xdmcp-bin". It will fully implement the XDMCP protocol and talks to any
Display Manager; however, instead of creating a new X server like Xephyr
or Xnest does, it simply ask the Display Manager to connect to an
existing one (usually this is the X server that $DISPLAY is pointing to
- like any other X clients).

So here comes the real thing. :) A typical XDMCP over SSH senario would
be:

LOCAL$ Xephyr :1 (or even X :1, whatever that creates a new X server)
LOCAL$ export DISPLAY=:1
LOCAL$ ssh -X REMOTE xdmcp-bin -query localhost

What happen in the third line is that, "xdmcp-bin" runs on REMOTE, query
its Display Manager to create a new session and connect to "xdmcp-bin"'s
DISPLAY environment, which is a X11 tunnel that connects back to :1 at
LOCAL. You know what should happen next: we tunnel XDMCP session.

I am totally new to X.org development. I would like to get your comments
before I get started with this new feature.

Thanks,

Vic