remote control of FC6

[cdhgold]

I am running FC6 on my system at work. Using KDE as the desktop I have set it up to allow me to connect in thru VNC to be able to remote control the desktop so that I can run a application we use when i work remotely from home. I get authenticated to VNC and get to the unlock session dialog but the session dies before i can login. Also the connection I'm trying to connect from is a dial-up. How can i determine what is causing the problem? If it is just timing out over my slow connection what can i do about it. Also when at the FC system there is no analog phone line to be able to test from so I can't test both ends of the connection at same time.

thanks
cdhgold

[Void Main]

So I'm not the only one? I noticed when I tried to connect to my MythTV box several weeks back via VNC it would just crash X on the Myth box. It didn't used to do it so it must have been an update somewhere along the line the broke things. I never really looked into it as I don't use VNC much but down that you have a problem too I'll dig around and see if I can find an answer. I suspect a problem with a vino package update (if you are running Gnome's remote desktop). I'm actually running KDE on my Myth box so I don't think vino would be the culprit there.

[cdhgold]

to clarify my error when it appears to time out X does not die on FC6 i just never get to login to FC6. i can then retry to connect and get same response.

[Void Main]

How do you have remote desktop configured because there are several different ways and the answer would be different in each. For example, I was just looking at my setup and remembered that I was running the Xorg vnc module (configured in /etc/X11/xorg.conf) which would give me access not only to the desktop but to the GDM login manager. I believe that is what was crashing on me because I just commented out that module and enabled the remote desktop in KDE and am able to remote control it just fine. Are you using the Default Gnome desktop and remote control option? If so that uses "vino" and is configured via the "vino-preferences" command. If you have that configured properly then check netstat to make sure it is listening:

netstat -an | grep 5900

Which should list something like this:

Code: Select all

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:5900                0.0.0.0:*                   LISTEN


If that part looks good and you still can't get a login prompt from a remote machine then you probably do not have that port open in your iptables (firewall) configuration.

[cdhgold]

VNC is configured via the krdb app within KDE I'm not using iptables. I can connect to the system via VNC. when i leave my box i lock the session and it is when I'm trying to unlock the session that i lose the connection. If there is a better way to configure the remote access into KDE I'm willing to try it. However when I try the same thing from a system n the same internal LAN as my FC box it works. Also this method seems to only let me access the session on:0 and I'm running dual monitors with seperate desktops that i would like to access as well as i have to be logged on to system and in KDE to be able to access system. If someone can point me to better way to configure this that would let get to both desktops regardless of whether or not I'm logged in that would be great.

[Void Main]

Couple of thoughts. You could disable the screen lock or you could start up a new VNC server session (with the vncserver command). I don't have any idea what KDE's remote desktop server's capabilities are but generally vnc will only be able to take over one X server instance (:0 or :1, not both) so if you have a separate X server running on each head I don't think you can do it without two separate connections and two Windows.

But why does it matter? I mean both heads are set up to be one virtual desktop right? So why not just start a vncserver with the x/y dimensions you desire and connect to that? Check the "-geometry" parameter in the vncserver man page. If your virtual desktop is set up as 2048x768 just start a vncserver with that geometry and that's what you'll get when you connect to it. Now, by default vncserver won't start KDE but it's trivial to set your config file to start KDE and bring up your personalized desktop. I think this is probably the way you'll want to go by the sounds of it.