X-related questions
Rick Stevens
rstevens at vitalstream.com
Fri Nov 11 20:26:52 UTC 2005
On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 13:12 -0700, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
> After over a decade of running text-only servers, and thanks to
> William Hooper yesterday with his help on getting one of my systems
> upgraded, I now have a dedicated X-server machine. Gnome's running nice
> and cozy. I have to say, I'm impressed, very impressed. I even went as
> far as having VNC display my desktop on my Windows workstation so I can
> always get to that server.
>
> But now I have some questions:
>
> In order for VNC to connect and work, I have to be logged in on the
> server console. Once I log out, it also kills the VNC connection and I
> can't get on anymore. So, is there some way to setup VNC so that I
> don't have to be logged onto the server? In other words, leave the
> server console logged out (sitting at the login screen) and be able to
> remotely connect through VNC, log in and work remotely?
If you load the "vnc" module in the X configuration, then you share
the main display. Whatever shows up on the primary screen on the Linux
box shows up in your VNC viewer window. Add the line:
Load "vnc"
to the 'Section "Module"' part of /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, and restart
X.
> Second, since I refuse to log in as root, specially when I'm doing
> it remotely, this raises some issues. For example, when I need to edit
> system files, say /etc/hosts, I can't do it. When I launch gedit and
> open that file, it tells me the file is read-only because I'm not the
> owner. The correct action of course, however there's no way for me to
> allow gedit to edit that file by means of additional credentials. Even
> if I authenticate as root (by launching some system related
> configuration) it still won't let me edit system files (while logged in
> as a regular user.) So again, how can I get past this? I don't want to
> have to open a terminal window and using sudo or su to get to root just
> to edit the file ... in a text window. Otherwise why have X installed, eh?
Well, I tunnel VNC through ssh, so stuff is encrypted. You log in as
the normal user, then "sudo vi /etc/hosts" or whatever to get done what
you want.
To use VNC ssh tunneling, create your ssh password file, then add:
Option "passwordfile" "/path/to/ssh/passwd/file"
to the "Section 'Screen'" part of /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart X.
You'll need a VNC viewer that understands tunneling. Under Linux,
"vncviewer -via gateway hostname" works, where "gateway" is the host
name of the machine running sshd. sshd and the display is on the same
machine in my case, so "vncviewer -via prophead prophead" gets me to
my display.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc. http://www.vitalstream.com -
- -
- Consciousness: that annoying time between naps. -
----------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the fedora-list
mailing list