how to start up vncserver w/o login?

[Mike]

Dave Stevens <geek <at> uniserve.com> writes:

> But does anyone know what I need to do to make the vncserver start up without 
> a user login? And also it should be possible (or perhaps it will happen by 
> default) that I can log in to the x session after I get access with 
> vncviewer. References, howtos, pointers to documents welcome.

OK what I do is as follows:

On the machine that acts as the vnc server I add a section in xorg.conf
like:
Section "Module"
        Load  "vnc"
EndSection

and also in the "screen" section there is a password line added
like: 
Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Videocard0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth     24
        Option      "passwordFile" "/opt/local/etc/vnc/passwd"
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Modes    "1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

That machine is booted to runlevel 5 and nothing further needed there.

In the client machine I have entries in .ssh/config such as 

Host farend
#next line when port forwarding for ssh changes from 22 to 23456
Port 23456
ForwardAgent    yes
Hostname        farend.specialhost.co.uk
LocalForward    55900 localhost:5900

So in one terminal window I then:
ssh farend
and this sets up the tunnel with port forwarding from local 55900
to remote 5900

Then I have a script which is run in a second terminal window that
essentially does
vncviewer -passwd ~/.vnc/passwd localhost:55900

Then this gives a vnc window to the server machine via the tunnel even if
the remote user has not yet logged in provided X on the server is running.

I hope this helps.