[CentOS] SSH + VNC

Sat Apr 1 17:52:32 UTC 2006
Bart Schaefer <barton.schaefer at gmail.com>

On 4/1/06, Ryan <ryanag at zoominternet.net> wrote:
> William Hooper wrote:
> > something like the vnc loadable module (
> > http://www.realvnc.com/products/free/4.1/x0.html ).
> >
> Shouldn't vino do that for me?

There have been a few threads about vino on this list, starting about
a year ago.  They all resolved with vino being abandoned in favor of
using the loadable vnc module in the X server.

I can't believe vino is that difficult to get working, since RH
includes it as a distributed package, but the documentation is close
to non-existent.  In any case it's apparent that it doesn't run
automatically -- the local desktop user has to enable it before remote
users can connect.  It's also not obvious on which port it will listen
for connections, making it difficult to preconfigure an SSH tunnel.

> Does anyone know how, or have any links on how-tos, for the
> CentOS way of doing this?

The link that William posted (above) has fairly complete instructions.
 The vnc loadable module is included with the Xorg server on CentOS 4,
so you just have to enable it in the xorg.conf file as decribed on
that web page, and set a password.

I then use (on the remote machine)

  ssh -N -f -L 5901:${vncserverhost}:5900 ${vncserverhost}
  vncviewer :1

It may also work to use 5901:localhost:5900 but I haven't tried that recently.