[Techtalk] Viewing desktops on a remote LAN

[David Sumbler]

On Sat, 2010-01-09 at 16:30 +0000, Chris Wilson wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> > On Jan 9, 2010, at 6:27 AM, David Sumbler <david at aeolia.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > > She now has two computers connected via an ADSL router.  Both 
> > > computers run Ubuntu (8.06 and 9.10).  I have set things up so that I 
> > > can log into the router, and also SSH to both computers 
> > > simultaneously: I use two different port numbers.
> > >
> > > In order to set everything up the way she wants it, I now want to be 
> > > able to see her desktops, but I haven't figured out how to do this. 
> > > Having read the Gnome help, I believe that the Gnome remote desktop is 
> > > inherently insecure: I would prefer to tunnel things over SSH, 
> > > probably using vncserver and vncviewer (or perhaps Vinagre).
> > > 
> > > Can anybody explain what I need to do to get this to work, please?
> 
> On Sat, 9 Jan 2010, Linda wrote:
> 
> > IIRC, you can use the -X switch on your ssh session and it will bring 
> > you the desktop.
> 
> I'm not sure this is what you want, as it will allow you to start new X 
> applications but not to see the whole desktop or to share it with your 
> friend live.
> 
> You can port-forward VNC over SSH for each machine like this:
> 
>   ssh <friend> -p <port1> -L 5900:localhost:5900
>   vncviewer localhost
> 
>   ssh <friend> -p <port2> -L 5900:localhost:5900
>   vncviewer localhost
> 
> However you cannot run both of these at the same time, as both will try to 
> use local port 5900 on your connecting client, and nor can you do it like 
> this if you also run a local VNC server on port 5900 of your connecting 
> client already. You could do something like this:
> 
>   ssh <friend> -p <port1> -L 5901:localhost:5900
>   ssh <friend> -p <port2> -L 5902:localhost:5900
>   vncviewer localhost:1 (connects to computer 1)
>   vncviewer localhost:2 (connects to computer 2)
> 
> Hope this helps,

That sounds perfect.

However, I'm stumped.  I decided to try
'ssh <friend> -p <port1> -L 5900:localhost:5900 -l username'
on one computer, just to see if it worked.  Having logged in, I ran
vncpasswd on the remote computer and set a password.

When (in a second terminal) I run 'vncviewer localhost', the VNC
authentication window appears, with the username greyed out.  I then put
in the password that I set on the remote machine, but I get
"Authentication failure" every time.  I have tried resetting the
password etc., but I can't get past this stage.

What's going wrong?

David

-- 
David Sumbler <david at aeolia.co.uk>