Today's installment: audiotool.
I want to play MP3s on my SS20. However, that machine is currently doing WWV_AUDIO service for NTP. That driver has flags that enable you to monitor the audio both in and out of the driver. Since you can fudge them on the fly, the driver opens the audio device for reading _and writing_. Grrr. Never mind, I'll just move this service to the SS10, which usually runs headless (though it has a keyboard). NTP has the same flags for this device on the SS10 as on the SS20, so I should be able to fire up audiotool just like on the SS20 to monitor the audio. Being virtually headless (there really is a keyboard and a framebuffer, but dtlogin doesn't run, so there's no window system), I need to rlogin to it and set the DISPLAY back in order to run audiotool. So I do all that, and audiocontrol comes up, and I frob the volume slider, and 60Hz hum comes up into audibility. Wait a minute, it's coming from the SS5's speaker. But I ran audiotool on the SS10, displaying back to the SS5. How is this possible??? Seems audiotool might've talked to rpcbind on the SS5 to get audiocontrol to run there. Why did they do that????
Running audiocontrol directly seems to do what I want.