Thanks, Karl, that is much neater than the way I was doing it. What I'm trying to set up is this ... The nameservers are all running xdm to catch broadcast xdmcp requests. These are given the chooser with a list of host names that is automatically derived from the nameserver content. Each calling server is thus indirected to the desired computer; in many cases, this will be the localhost just like the default.
Why ? I'd like to set this up because we have computers sitting around, most of which are connected to a variety of experimental systems. If two people want to work on the same system, or if the area around that system is not conducive to placing a human nearby, people simply grab the console of a nearby computer and work normally. It gets irritating fast, having to deal with a display manager that starts applications locally when you really want to run the apps on the target system. Starting the X server from inittab with the -indirect option implements this very nicely, but it is a pain switching each machine over by editing Xservers and inittab, putting in the tweaks that would normally live in Xreset (for a given server) and making sure the command line options in inittab match up with the values that were being used in xdm ... so it works! Thus, I was wondering whether there was a clean way to have xdm start (and restart) the X on the local computer, and send the display off for an xdmcp indirect where it would normally use the xlogin interface immediately.
