Tech query: running a Mac without a monitor

[hudebnik]

I believe we're about to take possession of a Mac G4 Tower without a monitor; my tentative plan is to use it as a file server. (This is really motivated by the desire for a keyboard, since my keyboard-cleaning experiment last week was less than totally successful; the computer comes as a bonus :-) I should be able to ssh into it, so I can administer the Unix side of things, but I don't know how difficult it is to administer the Mac side of things remotely. Paying $300 for Remote Desktop seems like overkill for my minimal needs. Has anybody on my tech-savvy flist done this sort of thing?

Comments

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

Well, you will probably need a monitor and keyboard and mouse on it just long enough to set up the proper services the first time: ...


I was hoping I could do this stuff from the command line, so I don't have to borrow a monitor.

BTW, I was practicing single-user mode on the iMac (which does have a monitor :-) and noticed, as it was shutting down, that it said "Stopping ARD Agent. Stopping VNC Server. [etc.]" I've never heard of a VNC server before last night, but it seems to have been running by default on the iMac... and since I think the tower has the same OS version, I can reasonably hope that a VNC server is already installed and running by default on it too. The question still is how to turn on those services....

You do NOT need to set the root password; and frankly, doing so is bad security practice. It is far better to have a separate "admin" account...

Yes, I plan to do that after I've got ssh, VNC, etc. working. But I figure the "root" user already exists, so I don't have to go through the extra step of creating a user yet. I think it unlikely that anything is going to hijack the tower, through a NAT firewall, in the time it takes to bootstrap my way into the tower.