VNC through an SSH tunnel
Background
If you are connecting to an IRC Linux server from outside the building, you will need to tunnel your VNC connection through SSH. The tunnel encrypts your communications with the server, protecting your passwords and other sensitive data.
Requirements
- An account on a Linux server that supports VNC
- An SSH client that supports tunneling
- VNC viewer
Create an SSH tunnel
1. Log in to the server with your SSH client and create a new VNC session (or look up your existing session). Determine your session number. (In the examples in the links below, we assume this to be 6. This corresponds to a "port" number of 5906. As another example, VNC session number 2 corresponds to port number 5902.)
2. On your local machine, create an SSH tunnel using one of the following techniques:
Open a VNC session
Now that you've created the SSH tunnel, start your VNC viewer and open a new connection. Instead of connecting directly to the Linux server, specify the host as "localhost". Use the same session number you determined above (6, for example).
To close your SSH tunnel
Type "exit" in the SSH session that you used to create the tunnel.