[nzlug] Best approach for remote-admin of a Debian box

[Andrew Errington]

On Mon, October 22, 2007 12:45, Martin Bähr wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 04:04:29PM +1300, Cameron Bradley wrote:
>
>> X via SSH tunnelling is slow, in many cases slower than
>> VNC... only way I can think of.
>>
>
> does vnc encrypt the communication? if not then the comparison makes no
> sense. if ssh slows down X then it will do so with vnc as well.

Generally VNC does not encrypt the connection.  The common solution is to
make an ssh tunnel to the target machine and run VNC over that:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/attarchive/vnc/sshvnc.html

This is quite an old document, so the technique may now be obviated.

Getting back to the subject- do you need more than a shell to admin a
Debian box?[1]  If not, all you need is ssh.  Your uncle needs to know how
to discover his own IP address and let you know, but I think this is
preferable to relying on a system like dyndns- one less thing to go wrong.
 In fact, your uncle doesn't need to know how- you do, so you can tell him
how.

I also don't think you mean remote-admin.  You mean shared desktop, so you
can control your uncle's cursor and see exactly what state his desktop is
in (hence why he called you...).

A

[1] You don't.