PuTTY vs. VNC?

[KFG14]

I have two Windows boxes that need to run sessions on a Red Hat Linux 9 machine from within my company WAN.

I was thinking about using VNC or PuTTY. Does anyone have experience with both and which one is better.

Thanks

Kevin

[Skithextrm]

Putty is an SSH client that you can use to connect to a machine running that service -- it's relatively secure but you only have a CLI and no GUI. VNC is like a the Windows Remote Desktop feature where you can actually see the desktop environment on which you are working -- the host machine needs to be running an Xvnc server to create a virtual desktop (usually on port 5901) and you connect through the VNC client on the guest machine. The problem with this is that it is relatively resource heavy and eats up a substantial portion of bandwidth (network dependent of course). What I do when I need to actually see my desktop is I will open up an SSH session and then use VNC to connect via that secure session. Here's the steps:


ssh -L 5902:hostmachineip:5901 username@hostmachineip


then open up a VNC session

localhost:5902


The ssh commands tells your machine to listen locally on port 5902 and to listen to the remote machine on port 5901. Therefore, you just need to open localhost:5902 to have a secure VNC connection.


Hope this helps,
Jon

[YogaFrog]

nice answer from Skithextrm
:)

So i won't write a long explanation.

I used VNC for quite some time now with great succes.

[Sepero]

Nice job Skithextrm. This might just be good enough for the HFL. I never knew that connecting VNC through ssh could be so simple. :)

[Skithextrm]

I wish I could take credit for that but I actually got that answer from a few helpful fellows on these forums.


--Jon