On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 02:56:37PM +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
On 30 Sep 14:48, Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 02:14:32PM +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
Brett Parker wrote:
On 30 Sep 12:38, Mark Rogers wrote:
What I am trying to do is reach the point where I can connect to a box in a remote office and use (eg) Firefox on the box to view locally hosted web pages, although once I have remote access to a "desktop" there are other ways I could (ab)use that.
Err, locally as in where you are as apposed to where firefox is running? That's, err, not going to work even if you do get NX installed.
Sorry, mixing my locations up. We have a box in a customer's office which runs a small web app (no remote access to the box except SSH). I can make changes to the web app via SSH but can't test the results unless I can "see" it. There are alternatives (eg I'm sure someone can tell me how to tunnel a web connection across SSH) but I'd like it to be something that selected "others" can use who are not Linux types (it'll mostly be me from my Linux box though).
Well it's dead easy to run via ssh, trivial even.
ssh -X <name.of.remote.system> ... and when connected ... firefoxslloooooooooooooow, forwarding X11 over the interwebs is Really Quite Slow. (And this is coming from the guy that used to run Netscape from a UEA machine over an ssh session over a 33.6k modem... even on ADSL it's "not quick").
Oh yes, it is quite slow, but for a quick one off test of something or for occasional use it works and is more straightforward than port forwarding.
... and it should just work running firefox on the remote system and displaying it on the local system. Just a couple of caveats/gotchas - you need to make sure the remote system doesn't change DISPLAY in its login process, and you *might* need to do "ssh -Y" instead of "ssh -X".
Hmm, I've never needed to use ssh -Y, and that does smack of insecurity. If ssh -X doesn't work then the remote system is probably just missing xauth, which is kinda useful for X11 sessions.
I need to use "ssh -Y" when doing this from work to my home system, this is working 'backwards' through a port forwarded pipe already and it was easier to try -Y than to fathom out the authorisation complexities.
Port forwarding is the easier option here, and, as I said before, can be done with PuTTY for those of a windows using nature.
For longer term use you're probably right, for the odd 'one off' ssh -X is useful.