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Using Barrier for OSX and IRIX.
What is Barrier? it’s the open port of Synergy – one of the best apps for sharing mouse and keyboard events across systems. Synergy was great until it went down the hole of commercialization and subscriptions. But luckily for us Barrier does it all with much less fuss.
Goal
Share the keyboard and mouse on my Mac, which I use 99% of the time, on my SGI Fuel. The Fuel has a monitor mounted right next to my Mac LCD panel so I can see the IRIX desktop. I’m not trying to share that- just the Mac Keyboard and Mouse. The SGI and Mac are on my same local private network.
OSX
I get barrier from brew, via:
$ brew install barrier
Run the application and setup the Mac as the server.
Expand the SSL fingerprint and copy the SHA1 key at the very bottom of the screen. We’ll put it on the client (SGI) in order to make a secure connection back, since this seems to be mandatory to get it to connect. At least it did for me. You may be able to do it without crypto, but if you try and have issues this could be the issue.
Add a client for the SGI and arrange it so that moving the mouse to that screen border will jump to the client host.
Click on the Start button to start the barrier server on your mac.
The server should startup and run:
IRIX
Take your SHA1 key string and put it into a file in this folder on your SGI:
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/barrier/SSL/Fingerprints vi ~/.local/share/barrier/SSL/Fingerprints/TrustedServers.txt
Install the barrier app using tiny DNF from SGUG’s RSE repo (RSE is RPM Software Environment)
$ sudo tdnf install barrier
For info on setting up RSE see this posting: https://irix.fun/2021/04/24/dandyum2-repo/
With the app running on the Mac, and barrier installed on your SGI, and the SHA1 key put into the TrustedServers.txt file, ssh into the SGI and start it up:
Foreground, in debug to see what is going on:
$ barrierc -f --debug DEBUG2 --enable-crypto [your server's IP address]
Background, when it’s working properly:
$ barrierc -daemon --enable-crypto [your server's IP address]
There are doc pages on GH for barrier in their project page.
There is a full man page for barrierc on IRIX use
man barrierc
to read it.
Once the client and server are running the mouse can be used to enter the SGI desktop. The keyboard will work as well. I’ve noticed that the screensaver starting on the Mac will also enable the SGI screensaver.
Enjoy.