X thro ssh

[STYMA, ROBERT E (ROBERT)]

> 
> Hi fellow admins,
> 
> I posted to this fedora.desktop and was redirected.
> 
> I have a peculiar requirement. We have two offices. People from second
> office(say #2) want to connect to the server in first 
> office(say #1). They
> want to run the GUI applications in the office #1 server from 
> office #2.
> 
> I tried to do this with VNC server and it works fine. But VNC 
> is goes thro
> unencrypted(open) connection. Is there a way to do this in a secured
> way(read that xdmcp is not possible as it uses UDP).
> 
> Inside our network(LAN) if connect from one system to other 
> thro ssh and
> start an gui application that application shows up in the client. This
> doesn't happen when i connect to server and start gui 
> apps(says display not
> set). iptables runs in the server. Do i have to open any port 
> for that?
> 
> Any help or pointer in this regard is appreciated.
> 
You can use port forwarding within SSH to accomplish this
task with VNC.  In a nutshell, you port forward some port near 5900
(the vnc port) on the local machine to port 5900 on the machine
running the vnc server.  This is done in your ~/.ssh/config file.
For example:
 LocalForward 5925 192.168.0.5:5900

You then run:
vncclient localhost:25
and it will connect through the secure tunnel to port 5900 on the
target machine.  In the example 192.168.0.5

For X, the task is even easier.  Run:
ssh -X -Y remote_machine.my.domain
(where remote_machine.my.domain is the other machine)
and X will be forwarded back to the local machine.
If this does not work, check the /etc/ssh/sshd_config to
make sure X11 tunnelling is allowed. (search for X11 in the file).

Bob Styma