Winboard Forum

I am considering to buy a dual-core 'monster', but as I travel by bicycle, I would hate to bring it with me to over-the-board tournaments like Leiden or the WCCC. With a desktop you get much more GHz-bang for your buck, though, than with a laptop.

It seems to me it should be possible to leave the PC at home, switched on and set up as an internet Chess server running my engine(s). I could then bring one or two small laptops to the tournament hall (which supplies an internet connection), and use Winboard/Zippy to log on to this PC in the same way I log on to ICC.

My question now is: are there any standard solutions for this? The laptop part seems easy enough (if I know the IP address of my machine at home), but what software would I need to set up the server?

You can setup a chess server by yourself.

http://216.25.93.108/forum/viewtopic.php?p=107233&highlight=source+fics#107233
I have not tried it. You need another computer for the server I suppose.

/Peter

I've written a blog post that may help you. You can read it here:

http://chess-engine.blogspot.com/2007/0 ... sting.html

Good luck!

A simple way to do it is to use ssh, and to run the GUI locally on your laptop, and the engine on the remote machine. This works fine as long as your engine is a console program, i.e. for all XBoard or UCI engines. I think this solution is superior to using Remote Desktop or X11 forwarding, because the bandwidth requirements are very modest (only a few lines of text are sent back and forth between the computers, and no graphics), and because it works even when the local and the remote machine run different operating systems.

I use the following very simple shell script on my laptop:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

ssh tord@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx "cd /path/to/Glaurung && ./glaurung"


(Insert an IP address or a hostname for "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx").

I start this script from the GUI. From the perspective of the GUI, the script behaves exactly like an ordinary UCI engine: The GUI doesn't even realize that the engine is running on a remote machine.

The script would probably look slightly differently in Windows, but I'm sure you get the idea.

Tord

Perhaps this utility can be helpful somehow:
http://home.pacific.net.au/~tommyinoz/na.html

Here a a few different options that can be used on different platforms;

The below link is a step by step setup for a windows based system, but the programs used (OpenSSL, Stunnel, VNC) are available for UNIX, Linux, Windows & Mac.
http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1677

Another option would be to use Hamachi's logmein program then you could use RDP or VNC or XWindows.
https://secure.logmein.com/products/ham ... sp?lang=en


Bryan

I do this from time to time, to run Prophet on a machine at my office with XBoard running on my home system.

On my home system:

Code: Select all

/usr/games/bin/xboard -fcp "ssh x.x.x.x ~/run_prophet.sh" \
        -ics -zp -icshost 207.99.83.228 -icshelper ./timestamp \
        -autoflag -size average


Where run_prophet.sh on the office system is just:

Code: Select all

cd prophet/bin
./prophet


If using this to run on an ICS, you have to stay away from bullet games, since the network latency between the two machines is penalized to you (unlike the latency between the machine running XBoard and the chess server itself which is accounted for by timestamp/timeseal).
Not such a big deal for longer games, or even for blitz games if the latency is very low.

I have used a free service on www.logmeon.com. You install a small program on your machine at home, then most any Internet browser gives you a full view and control securely. With luck you can borrow someone elses laptop. Andlogmeon deals with the network firewall issues so you do not have to. I have only used the free service from that site.