I have a headless Ubuntu server that I decided I wanted to put a monitor on to display status information. There are a ton of great programs available that display all sorts of status information, my problem is that I can't figure out how to get it to display on boot. When the server starts it just sits at the log-in prompt, of course I could just have it automatically log in at boot and run the program, but that is a security risk. How do I go about running, and displaying a program after boot without giving anyone with a keyboard access to the server?
I can imagine creating an unprivileged account and having it log into that at boot would work but I would prefer to have the program run independent of a terminal session.
Is there any alternatives?
Thanks
--UPDATE--
Ok, so I found this link: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/211544/run-top-instead-of-getty which almost completely describes what I want. I just need to know how to set the default displayed tty to tty5.
Any thoughts?
getty
ontty1
(virtual console 1) to run something else (liketop
). Alas, I have absolutely no idea how to do that now that 16.04 is running systemd. I googled around and all solutions seem very convulsed.