Bill Campbell wrote:
The real *NIX way of accessing a graphical application remotely is by using a remote X desktop. It sounds strange if you're not familiar with it, but basically you run the 1 application on the remote server, and the application window (and only the application window), shows up on your local workstation.
Or you can run the whole desktop remotely - or many of them on thin clients. Freenx does this just as well as X locally (perhaps with a bit more overhead, but the tradeoff is that you can suspend and reconnect).
>> SSH provides a way to do this securely.
The drawback is you will need an X server running on your local computer, but that can be had for free in Windows from cygwin.
You can use the easily installed (and free) NX client from windows and macs without installing anything extra. And it uses ssh so you only need port 22 open to the destination.
I don't Do Windows(tm) so rarely have to deal with them. When working with Linux and other *nix systems, it's always through ssh with X11 forwarding for those rare occassions when I need to do something like run Firefox from a client's machine to access a router from their private LAN. That can get a bit clunky on slow connections, but it does work.
Freenx isn't all that clunky even on slow connections, which, aside from the ability to reconnect to running sessions, is the main reason to use it. It takes a bit of time for the initial screen to draw, but the protocol does a good job with subsequent updates.
If I'm on a fast connection, I'll run the xterm on the remote system with ``ssh -f remotename xterm'', but if it's a slow connection ``xterm -e ssh remotename &'' to run the xterm on my local machine.
I like to keep a freenx session running on a machine at the office with windows already open to a bunch of other systems (it is just like any other X desktop). When I'm there I connect from a multi-head windows box with the NX client filling one monitor with this session so it is pretty much indistinguishable from a local Linux box except that I can cut and paste between it and the windows programs on the other monitor. When I leave, I suspend the session and can pick it up from a Mac at home or a windows laptop on the road. Any long-running commands are still there and if there is a problem with connectivity it doesn't kill anything - you can still reconnect with things running.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
