Peter wrote:

Does anyone know how to do this? I have a friend in another part of England who regularly wants help with how to do things in OO. So, most of the time I start up OO myself and work in parallel with him and talk him through it. But, he's not very sophisticated and often has trouble following, or even describing very accurately what he is seeing.

Today was what led me to think we need another way, when for some mysterious reason printing a journal article he has written, in the approved format of 2 pages per sheet in landscape form, ran into problems. So I find myself saying, you see that icon with the little hand over the printer.... Very time consuming.

I have set him up on broadband using a router, so there is a hardware firewall at his end, and of course, NAT. I have put Suse 9.2 in for him, so there is a software firewall as well.

I would like to be able, securely, to run VNC and actually demonstrate what he has to do. If we didn't have the firewalls....it would be easy! But with the router, he doesn't have a public IP address - exactly why I made him get one, of course. Oh dear.

I am not terribly sophisticated in this stuff, so if anyone can give a simple step by step account, would be very grateful.

Since you have a Linux box at the other end and therefore have an SSH server to connect to I would suggest the best way would be to tunnel over SSH. If you run TightVNC then this is very easy (I can't speak for others, they may well have done the same). If you set up a port forward for SSH to his SuSE box (ideally restricted to your own IP address if you are on a static one) then it is simply a case of using the -via option to define the SSH server at the other end you want to log into. Use username@hostname as the format for the -via parameter and it will prompt you for your SSH login. Once you have done this you have an encrypted tunnel into the network at the other end and the last parameter of the command simply needs to be the local IP address on the remote network.

So with an SSH server running on a remote machine myfriend.example.com with the local machine being on 192.168.0.5 and your remote SSH account being myaccount you would get:

vncviewer -via myaccount@myfriend.example.com 192.168.0.5

the first prompt would be for your SSH password then you should get one for the VNC session (just don't test this on a loop back to your own machine - it's not a pretty site as I've just found out confirming that!).

Oh, for the remote end on Linux take a look at the x11vnc package, you can start this with something like:

x11vnc -passwd mypass -display :0

from the CLI when required. This gives remote access to the users desktop rather than a separate X11 login.