X forwarding

[Steven Elling]

On Saturday 19 October 2002 10:43, Duane Attaway wrote:
<snip>

> Yes, you can export a window manager to your workstation.  From there,
> you should be able to run everything on your "sever" to be displayed on
> your X server, or workstation.  This would be...interesting.
>

Here is what I did at work to pull up my whole desktop from home onto my NT 
4.0 box at work.

I ran SSH on port 443 on my firewall at home.  This was to get past the 
firewall at work.  Can you determin why this works?  Hint: look up port 443 
in /etc/services and then look up how a firewall treats the traffic over 
that port.

I used MindTerm on my box at work to ssh through the firewall at work to 
port 443 on my firewall.  My ssh session was setup to forward specific 
ports from my work box to boxes on my home network.  The ports that were 
forwarded were those used by VNC Viewer.

A VNC Server was setup and running on my boxes at home to accept VNC 
connections on the forwarded ports.  My linux box was configured to run the 
desktop or window manager of my choice.  BTW: VNC Server is a scaled down X 
server.

The real magic happed when I brought up the VNC client on my work box and 
told it to connect to 'localhost:0', 'localhost:1', or 'localhost:2' 
depending on which box I wanted to connect to.  What would happen is the 
port used for display 0, 1 or 2 on my work box would get forwarded over 
both firewalls to the appropriate box at home and it was secure and pretty 
uesable.  At one point I had up three VNC sessions to three different boxes 
at home.