Quick VNC setup

June 8, 2018

So!, lets say you need to connect to a remote computer to access some graphical application (browser, text-editor,some obscure information system, etc) and the old ssh user@host -X will just not cut it, what do you do? VNC of course. For this specific recipe to work a number of things need to be true:

Prerequisites

You can install software in both remote and local machines
You can ssh into the remote machine
The connection between both machines is stable and has low latency (<50ms)
Both machines run Linux, here we use Fedora but the only real difference between distros is the names of the tigervnc and tigervnc-server packages

VNC Server (Remote machine)

Firs install a VNC server

$ sudo dnf install tigervnc-server

and then start the server

$ vncserver :1

that is it! this is a VERY unsafe and crappy way to do this, you can improve security a bit (for tigervnc at least) by editing ~/.vnc/config

securitytypes=None
localhost

This will allow for password-less authentication (yuck!) but will only accept connections from localhost (which is nice!)

VNC Client (Local machine)

Install a VNC client

$ sudo dnf install tigervnc

Connect to the remote machine using this fancy ssh command

$ ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 -fN remote_host

followed by:

$ vncviewer localhost:1

Done! no firewall setup, no long configuration. From here you will get a basic terminal from which you can start whatever it’s that you need.