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waldyrious
Asked: 2013-01-22 11:54:34 +0800 CST

How to connect to home computer from work computer behind VPN (using remote desktop viewer)?

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I have a dyndns account linked to my home computer and everything is set up so that I can SSH to it from my work (university) computer. I then connect it to the university VPN (using these steps) and proceed to attempt to use the Remote Desktop Viewer to access it graphically. However, this fails, I'm not sure why. I tried using the dyndns URL, and the local addresses returned by running ifconfig on the home laptop:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:90:f5:be:62:10  
          inet addr:192.168.1.78  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
ppp0      Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol  
          inet addr:192.168.94.81  P-t-P:192.168.94.21  Mask:255.255.255.255

but none of those worked, even after specifying the port 5900 (which I believe should be automatically selected). I am not sure which one I should be using (inet addr, P-t-P?)

The error I get is Connection to host <hostname> was closed, although sometimes it seems like a timeout, while others it fails immediately.

Here's the output of ifconfig in my work computer:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr bc:ae:c5:2d:3a:ef  
          inet addr:192.168.94.7  Bcast:192.168.94.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
vpn

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The way to go here probably is tunneling your VNC through the SSH session or using a reverse VNC protocol.

    The default Ubuntu remote desktop viewer Remmina can be set up to do this.

    Provided the VNC server can tunnel the VNC protocol through SSH you can use any VNC viewer capable of receiving this signals.

    We do that here using x11vnc Install x11vnc as the VNC server and vncviewer (of xtightvncviewer Install xtightvncviewer).

    If you already had set up VNC on your home computer it is as easy as running

    x11vnc -display :0

    on your home machine to export display :0 through VNC. This can also be done through an SSH session. Note that for the next step you need to run an SSH server on your home machine.

    In your office run the vncviewer with option -via for tunneling through SSH:

    vncviewer -via [email protected] localhost:0

    For a throughout guide see: x11vnc home page.

    See the following question on how to connect to your remote machine using lightDM:

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