how to start up vncserver w/o login?

Dave Stevens geek at uniserve.com
Sun Jun 8 00:03:04 UTC 2008


On Saturday 07 June 2008 03:24:18 am Mike wrote:
> 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.

It does and seems as if it would work. I have stopped work on this because it 
seems vnc is unavoidably unacceptably slow. I tried Freenx and the nomachine 
linux client and it addresses the need for pre-login functionality nicely and 
gives much better throughput, allows higher resolutions, etc.

Thanks for all replies.

dave

-- 
In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual 
solution to the so-called war between good and evil. My books are not 
conceived in terms of such a war, and offer no simple answers to simplistic 
questions.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin




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