[KLUG Members] RE: Remote control (and security)

[Robert V. Kanaley]

Jeremy,

As Bruce said, there are lots of howto's to setup Desktop Sharing on a Linux
box. But, I would add a word of caution. Unless you really, really trust the
network you are VNC'ing across, it is probably best to take steps to protect
any machine with open VNC ports. I VNC into lots of machines, including NT4,
but I always SSH into them first and establish a secure tunnel for VNC.
Then, on each host I only allow localhost connections to the listening VNC
server. If you can't SSH into the machine, you can't connect to the
listening VNC server. On Linux boxes I use IPTables to block access to the
listening VNC ports. It should be possible to use xinetd to accomplish this
same thing, but I couldn't get it to work. Most of the VNC doc's explain how
to setup the SSH tunnel. If you need more help just post.

Regards,

Bob

Robert V. Kanaley
Manager Information Systems
Agdia, Inc.
rvk at agdia.com
http://www.agdia.com