send commands to pc's over a lan.. question.

[eldiet]

Before you say Remote Desktop or vnc let me explain what i want to accomplish.

I picked up a kiosk pc off ebay with a 12" touchscreen. I plan to flush mount it into a wall of the house and use it for home automation. It will probably be running a front end such as myHTPC (www.myhtpc.net). Big buttons to push, but no keyboard interaction.

So as an example.. lets say I wanted to have my htpc start playing music. Could I push a button on the kiosk that sends the command to the htpc to run winamp.

Is this doable? it seems like it is, but i cant think of the software i'd need.

 

[Flagg]

Option 1
Hmm. Touchscreens use RS-232 i think to communicate with the PC. Technically you could mount the monitor in the wall, and run the control cable (rs-232) to the PC stored elsewhere in the rouse. Just use cat5 for the cablen the create an rj-45 -> DB9 with the appropriate pinout.

Option 2
If you wanted to pass rs-232 commands over your lan there is a program called ComIP that encapsualted rs-232 commands with IP packetss, but I think option 1 would be easier.

 

[eldiet]

just doing a quick search, that seems like ancient technology.. i'll look into it, but there has to be something more current that'd allow this.

 

[SKiTLz]

You could always do it with just simple SSH access or something.

Write some shell scripts to shh/telnet to the machine, & run the command on button push...