Reply To: Twitt-arrrr!
An idea for headless access to a Mini in the event of not being able to get connected to the ship LAN for some reason: Connect and configure a USB ethernet dongle with a static IP and tell the Mini to share the VNC/ARD over it. As long as you’ve got a laptop and a cable, you can always connect to it on it’s “private” ethernet to make config changes to get it working on the ship’s LAN. Then you can just pull the USB when you’re done with that.
We have a couple headless machines for work, and a second ethernet interface is how we connect in and configure their networking when we get to a client that wasn’t able to give us the configuration ahead of time. It doesn’t interfere and it always works as a backdoor as long as you always use the same USB port (not sure if it would re-address the adapter on a different port).