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Remote X11 Sessions?

Posted by Cliff on from the more-than-just-setting-your-DISPLAY dept.

fyrebryan writes "I am fairly new to linux (approx 1 year), and while I have gotten fairly good at working with linux (and love it!!) there is something that i have not been able to find much info about on the web. it is how to run an X Windows session remotely. Security is something that does have me worried, but i am fairly sure that security has already been addressed. If anyone could please help me out and point me to some more info about running X remotely (and possibly on a Win9x machine) it would be greatly appreciated." Is there a good, comprehensive primer on remote X11 sessions that include things like setting up: encrypted X11 sessions, common xhost and MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE problems and so forth? Sometimes, pointing your DISPLAY environment variable to the right server just isn't sufficient, and combing thru man pages don't yield much in the search for workable information.

3 of 17 comments (clear)

  1. X FAQ by DAldredge · · Score: 3

    Here is a like to a collection of X related faqs from comp.windows.x

    X FAQ

  2. Virtual Network Computing by The+Unconquered+One · · Score: 3
    AT&T's research department released VNC, the Virtual Network Computing client under the GNU GPL. There's a short tutorial from the FreeBSD Zine explaining how to set up VNC, but for the most part, it applies to Linux also.

    VNC is a real gem because it is truly platform independent, and can run on even the most nonUnix systems such as Windows. No need to install a bulky X server on the client machine just to run a few xterms or oclocks.

    --
    It's not cool to use other peoples code... -
  3. ssh is pretty standard for this by texarkana · · Score: 4

    Ssh is very easy to configure for this - indeed many installations turn it on by default! Read your ssh client docs for how to do it or do a google search. This works great for unix and windows-based ssh clients and X servers.

    Even with this, you must still secure your X server. Do not use host based security(xhost)security, make sure that is set to allow no hosts. (I think you need to allow localhost if using windows with ssh - it's been a while )

    I would use the ssh mechanism even on the local LAN as it is simple to implement and pretty
    transparent to users.

    Magic cookie with xauth works well. I know there are issues with the type of cookie and whether you are using NFS to distribute the cookies, etc. but I haven't worked in that type of environment in a while. R5 can do XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1, but you had to do some tweaks to make it work.

    There is an old oreilly book 'X Window System Administrator's Guide' that is pretty good, though it doesn't cover release 6. Presumably
    R6 added some security stuff, but I've never looked into this.

    This seems somewhat informative:
    http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/mini/Remote- X- Apps-6.html

    Hope this helps,
    TeX