Accessing a UNIX box remotely via XWindow

I've done this once before and since forgotten how I did it.

This time, I thought it would be useful to record for myself and others.

The problem is that to access a graphical display on a Linux/UNIX box remotely, you need some sort of XWindow emulator. There are very good, albeit, expensive, XWindow emulators like eXceed, but I'm cheap and I like lighter software (eXceed loads WAY more than what you need to do what I need to do).

Net, I target open source stuff.

First, I downloaded TinyVNC. Version 1.3.9 came as a self-extracting exe file. If you are just using this to access stuff on a Linux box (like I am), then you don't have to worry about registering the TightVNC Server as a system service (an option in the setup).

To get the whole thing running, just log onto your Linux box and type "vncserver". This will create a service listening on port 5901. To connect to it, fire up TinyVNC and use the IP of your machine and ":5901". This will connect you to a graphical display of the OS logged in as the user who fired up the vncserver.

Pretty spiffy... Just like sitting in front of the box.

Now, there are a few other cool things to do:

1. Get the whole thing running over an ssh tunnel
2. Set it up so you just have to click on a TinyVNC icon (assuming that vncserver is already running)

To run it over an SSH tunnel:

1. Fire up vncserver as you did before on the destination machine
2. Fire up PuTTY
1. Connection -> SSH -> X11 -> Enable X11 Forwarding
2. Connection -> SSH -> X11 -> X display location: localhost:0
3. Connection -> SSH -> Tunnel
   
1. Add a new forwarded port
1. Source = 5901
2. Destination = 127.0.0.1:5901

Is saying, "PuTTY, talk across this divide and know that anything I send to you on localhost at port 5901 really goes across your tunnel to port 5901 on the other machine... And, oh, forward any X Window stuff back to my display." When you start up TightVNC and tell it to go to 127.0.0.1:5901, PuTTY immediately routes (forwards) that request to port 5901 on the destination machine (the one running vncserver).

Viola!!! It works.

Now to make it "easier" by double clicking an icon...

Actually, I don't think it's possible to do it over the SSH tunnel without decent amounts of work. No matter how I try to slice it, you need two icons -- one for PuTTY an one for TightVNC Viewer.

We'll leave this one for another day... Don't forget to save your tunneling stuff inside PuTTY if you don't want to reconfigure it next time you wanna do it.

- Ray