Is there are a way to connect to dom0 using VNC without running X? I don't want an X server, I just want to see what is on the console.
EDIT: Adding some background, since people seem to be really annoyed that I would ask such a question and that ssh isn't an acceptable solution in this case for getting to dom0:
The reason I want to VNC to the console is NOT for the purpose of managing this system (actually 600 laptops running Debian Squeeze with Xen and multiple VMs for 4 days at a conference in August). SSH works great for that, and I wouldn't dream of using anything else for management. But, there are two major things that I want to be able to do:
1) See EXACTLY what is on the actual /dev/console while talking to someone who is sitting in front of the machine. A small team of people are responsible for preparing these systems for the conference, and we aren't all geographically located in the same place. In this case, these systems are 3000 miles from me, 5000 miles from another member of the team, and ~100 miles from a third. Being able to see what is on the screen is of tremendous importance when working with "remote hands" who are sitting in front of a system trying to figure out why some particular task isn't working properly.
2) See any error messages that were sent to /dev/console and no-where else (which happens WAY more often than I would have guessed prior to starting this project). I've determined there are two primary reasons that this occurs: 1) sometimes lazy developers log errors or debug output to /dev/console by way of a redirect, without bothering to use the system's logger or other functionality that causes the error to get recorded in a file; and 2) when your IO subsystem has collapsed because of something bad happening, but network and cpu are still fine, error messages won't get recorded in a log file immediately prior to the system crashing and burning. At least if I had been working in /dev/console, I'd be able to see the error message instead of having to call someone and ask them to take a picture of the screen for the 20 or 30 seconds that it is on the console before the system reboots.
It would also be pretty freaking cool to bring up little tiny windows on all 600 machines on a giant display (well, lots of displays), during the conference, and see what is happening on each one.
So, I've found the answer, as a result of another answer that was totally condescending and really upset me (and was deleted), but forced me to dig and dig to figure out how to do this. The answer lies within x11vnc, which was apparently created partly for this purpose. Luckily, Xen actually installs x11vnc for me, so I don't even have to install it. Just run:
and blammo, vnc to the console. Like a KVM, but requires network. There are a million options for x11vnc, and I haven't explored them all yet, but this is perfect and exactly what I need. To run it in the background, add a bg flag:
What about the 'screen' command's -rx option - which allows you to connect to an already active screen session of a user on the local machine, and see and interact with everything they see.
It could get a bit hairy trying to keep your wits with several hundred screen sessions - but it hardly seems worse than several hundred VNC session...
I'm not sure what you mean by console. If you need command-line access to the Dom0's operating system SSH should be sufficient for both Citrix's XenServer or any DIY Linux/NetBSD implementation. If you need to see the Dom0's hardware's "console", you need something like iLO or another Out-Of-Band management facility (which VNC by definition cannot provide).