[NBLUG/talk] VNC to use the console desktop

[E Frank Ball]

On Sun, Jul 11, 2004 at 02:08:01PM -0700, Cameron Tully-Smith wrote:
} Hi all,
} 
} I've got VNC working to allow remote connections, but not to shadow the
} console.  Any ideas?

vnc can't do that.  You need a program called "rfb" (remote
frame buffer).

rfb runs a vnc session on the "console" (more correctly the
native X11 session) and you can connect to it with any vnc
viewer program.

You don't say what distribution you are using.  rfb is
apt-gettable with debian.

This site has redhat/fedora rpms.  Get the rfb and libxclass
RPMs.  This site is useable with apt for rpm and yum:
browse: http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/
apt-get for rpm sources.list entry: 
rpm http://apt.sw.be redhat/9/en/i386 dag

There are RPMs for SuSE and Mandrake on www.rpmfind.net.
You will need the RFB and the xclass RPMs.  The SuSE 8.2
RPMs work on RedHat 9.

I've been using rfb at work, here are some snippets from the
documentation I wrote:

Run the x0rfbserver binary on the machine that you want to
export the X display from.  This can be done remotely by
logging into the remote machine and setting the display to
that machine.  The x0rfbserver spews a lot of garbage, so I
redirect the output to /dev/null.  For remote execution I
use this script, start-rfb:

#!/bin/sh
# script to start RFB (remote frame buffer)
check=`netstat -ln | grep tcp | grep "0.0.0.0:5900" | awk '{print $4}'`
if [ ! $check ]
then
   export DISPLAY=`hostname`.soco.agilent.com:0
   x0rfbserver 2> /dev/null > /dev/null &
fi

The RFB server will run on port 5900, just like the
vncserver for windows.  If an RFB server is already running
it will start a second server on port 5901, a third on port
5902, etc.  unix vncservers default to port 5901 since they
start a second X session (display:1).  My start-rfb script
will not start another RFB server if one is already running.
The script will not have any output, never ever (so I can
run it from cron).

More than one viewer client can connect to a single server,
so several people can watch/control the remote display at
once.  When the RFB server is running it brings up an icon
on the display.

Left Click on the Icon and select "Properties":  Now you can
disable remote keyboard & pointer inputs.  The password
function doesn't work.

The CPU MAX/MIN slide has a very limited useful range.  If
you move it all the way to MAX it really hammers the server
side CPU.  More than one tick mark to the right and it is
painfully slow.  About half a tick mark to the right of MAX
is optimum.


Other RFB and similar programs:

KDE has their <a href="http://www.tjansen.de/krfb/">own version of
RFB</a>.  The binary is krfb.  Run krfb or pick "desktop sharing" from
the KDE menus.  It uses one time passwords and sends email to users
invited to share the X session.

also;
http://xf4vnc.sourceforge.net/
http://www.adam-lilienthal.de/directvnc/

-- 

   E Frank Ball                frankb at frankb.us