Re: OT: Any Red hat heads here?

["Paul Robinson" <ukcueman@xxxxxxx>]

> Still needs port 5900 though.  Yes, is blocked from work.

You don't need port 5900 to be accessible to use VNC if you can get SSH
through your firewall. You can use SSH to create a tunnel.

You can do this with the ssh command if you have cygwin (and the OpenSSH)
option. But I guess you don't use cygwin. A good (free) alternative for
windows access is to use Putty.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

To do this:
(1) Select protocol SSH
(2) Under the SSH tunnels options, add a local tunnel from port 5999 to
remote port localhost:5900
(3) Open the connection
(4) Run a vncviewer and connect to "localhost:99"

Note that VNC numbers are converted to port numbers by adding 5900. That's
why the 5999 translates to a VNC number of 99.

This assumes:
(a) The machine running the VNC server is also the ssh server.
(b) On your local LAN, you access the VNC server as
"YourVNCServer:0". If
you use :1, then change the 5900 to 5901. If :2, then 5902 etc.
(c) You run vncviewer and putty on the same machine. Otherwise you'll need
to set a putty option to allow the tunnel to be accessed from other
machines
(by default, the tunnel can only be accessed from the machine creating the
tunnel).

The tunnel works by listening on 5999 on your windows box, and any requests
to that port get forwarded by the other end of the tunnel to the
machine/port specified.

Another advantage of this is that you can then compress the data just by
ticking a box in putty.

Also, if you also tick the "Enable X11 forwarding" and you have
an X server
on your windows box, any X windows initiated from your ssh shell will
automatically be forwarded through the tunnel to your windows X server.

HTH
Paul