[UFO Chicago] remote desktop software

[Daniel Kelly]

Well, getting around firewalls can be difficult since most larger companies
use a good firewall with stateful packet inspection. When I worked at
motorola almost every protocol was blocked except for http, https, ftp, and
a few others. Logmein worked well since their service uses https. VNC can be
somewhat insecure since it's not encrypted unless used through ssh.

If you don't have to worry about strict firewalls I'd give X11VNC a shot. I
have my X11VNC set up to launch when I initiate an ssh session (using Putty
as a client). I set up a tunnel by selecting the local option, picking a
port like 5959 to bind to locally. You can also set up a dynamic tunnel that
acts as a SOCKS 5 proxy. There's a lot of good tutorials out there for
almost any flavor of unix or linux.

-Dan

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Eric Ellington <e.ellington at gmail.com>wrote:

> I would recommend VNC. VNC was the first remote desktop program I used
> on windows, it was easy to set up and worked great. However, I used
> VNC when it was still a free product from ATT. Googling VNC shows up
> many variants of VNC, but I am not familiar with all of the variants
> available today. Hopefully someone else can recommend one.
>
> When you start to know more about Linux remotely accessing machines
> using SSH is great, and you can start remote X sessions to use a
> remote desktop. I think VNC is a great place to start though, at least
> it was for me.
>
> Eric
>
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 2:46 AM, John Bulger <johnbulger at uicalumni.org>
> wrote:
> > First off, I am not a programmer or system administrator, just a user. I
> do
> > have an interest in migrating from Windows to one of the free UNIX style
> > operating systems. Thus, the reason that I came across and subscribed to
> the
> > mailing list.
> >
> > That said, I was looking into the possibility of using something like VNC
> to
> > operate a desktop machine remotely on a lightweight, low cost laptop. My
> > hope is that this way I can purchase the best hardware most cost
> effectively
> > and still enjoy mobility. Anyway, I came across the site below:
> >
> >
> http://ask.metafilter.com/60688/What-are-the-limitations-of-current-remote-desktop-applications
> >
> > I would like to invite anyone interested to provide their own comments.
> > Those on the site are more than a couple of years old and assume that
> > Windows XP is being used. I personally would prefer recommendations based
> on
> > UNIX, if that makes any difference. Some on the site would suggest using
> > Microsoft's Remote Desktop. I may decide to maintain a copy of Windows on
> a
> > partition of my machine, in which case Remote Desktop may be considered
> an
> > option I suppose and comments on that are also welcome.
> >
> > LogMeIn and UltraVNC appear to be the other favorites. Hamachi, an add-on
> to
> > LogMeIn was also recommended for avoiding any issues with firewalls
> though
> > someone also suggests that they may just as easily be avoided by using a
> > non-standard port for RDP and VNC clients. Again, anyone care to agree or
> > disagree?
> >
> > Finally, if anyone wishes to recommend a laptop suitable for this
> purpose,
> > please let me know.
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > John
> > _______________________________________________
> > UFO Chicago -- Users of Free Operating Systems
> > Free Software Rules -- Proprietary Drools!
> > http://ufo.chicago.il.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ufo
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Eric Ellington
> e.ellington at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> UFO Chicago -- Users of Free Operating Systems
> Free Software Rules -- Proprietary Drools!
> http://ufo.chicago.il.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ufo
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://ufo.chicago.il.us/pipermail/ufo/attachments/20091106/982b2ff9/attachment.htm