On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 12:59:06AM -0800, belinda thom wrote:
I'm in a bit of a bind---I need to get desktop access to a machine that I don't have physical access to.
Just a couple of questions... What kind of "desktop access" do you need? As in do you need X11 or Aqua[0]? I find X11 is simple to setup[1] and use it all the time as I work mostly on machines with X11 (if they have any windowing systems).
After some googling, I learned about VNCs, and that macports has both a server (osxvnc) and a client (cotvnc).
I have never used osxvnc, sorry. However I do have cotvnc (Chicken of the VNC), it's very simple to use.
I've never used a VNC and am a bit worried that I won't be able to set them up.
You have to start the vnc program on the server (osxvnc or any other vncserver), then it's just a matter of starting your local vnc client and point it to the server. A side note, what's in between the server and client network-wise? Same network without any firewalls?
Presumably, the server is the one that "serves up" the desktop, so the remote machine would have to run that. I only have access to that machine currently via Terminal and ssh.
Yeap. Having only ssh access might be hard if you want to do non-X11 stuff. If it's X11 you don't really need vnc and just X11 forwarding will work.
Has anybody done this type of thing before? Any insight/advice welcome.
Was any of this helpful? Or did I just make no sense at all? I hope I helped... Timothy [0] Am I correct in calling the OS X window system Aqua? You know the Cocoa stuff.... [1] Steps to use X11 remotely: - On your local machine (machine with the display) start X11 (Under OS X I think this is an additional package fro the developer CD. I can't really remember, sorry) - Make sure you are exporting your DISPLAY environment variable, this is normally along the lines of localhost:0.0. I have the following in my .profile: if [[ -z $DISPLAY && -z $SSH_CONNECTION ]]; then disp_no=($( ps -awx | grep -F X11.app | awk '{print $NF}' \ | grep -e ":[0-9]" )) if [[ -n $disp_no ]]; then export DISPLAY=`hostname`${disp_no}.0 else export DISPLAY=`hostname`0.0 fi fi Yes, I am a bit different.... :) - When connecting to the remote machine (server without the display), use ssh with X11 Forwarding enabled (`ssh -Y server`). I have the following in my .ssh/config: Host * Compression yes CompressionLevel 6 ForwardX11 yes Protocol 2,1 ServerAliveInterval 300 - On the server you should enable X11 Forwarding too. In /etc/sshd_config: X11Forwarding yes Now when you login to a remote machine you should be able run X11 applcations. Did any of that make sense or even address what you were asking? :)