[Techtalk] Viewing desktops on a remote LAN

[David Sumbler]

On Sat, 2010-01-09 at 18:33 +0000, David Sumbler wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-01-09 at 16:30 +0000, Chris Wilson wrote:
> > 
> > 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?

I have now solved this problem.  I found that I could start another
display on one of the remote machines, and there was no problem logging
into that.  It was only the default display (i.e. display :0) that gave
a problem.  It seems that the settings in "Remote Desktop" on the
relevant machine are what determines the behaviour, rather than the
password set by vncpasswd.  I think that that only applies when trying
to view displays :1 and upwards.

Thanks for the help.

David

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