MacOS – View desktop of very remote Ubuntu box from the MacBook Pro

macosscreen-sharingsshunixx11

So, I’ve searched for literally hours on this subject. Seen various solutions. But practically all of them are for people who want to see their Ubuntu desktop on their Mac, with both machines on the local network.

I want to log into an Ubuntu server that lives across the continent. I can easily log in over SSH, and I managed to get X11 configured such that I can SSH in, run sudo synaptic, and get the Synaptic window to come up on my machine to manage packages.

However, what I would really love is to be able to log in to the remote machine and see the desktop as if I were physically standing there.

Remote machine is running Ubuntu 10.4, I’m on OS X 10.6.8. I have admin rights on both machines. I also updated the bundled X11 on OS X to the latest version of XQuartz.

Anyone know if (and how) this is possible?

Best Answer

You can do it easily using ssh port forwarding. Open terminal and enter

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 remote_ip

with any other applicable settings you need. This will forward port 5900 on your local machine to port 5900 on the remote machine. If you need to change to a different local port (say, if you're already running a VNC server on your local machine), change the first 5900 to something else.

Then once the ssh connection is running, just VNC to localhost:5900, and you should get a connection to your remote machine.

If you don't have a VNC client already, there's one built in to Mac OS X. Open Finder, press ⌘K and enter vnc://localhost:5900 as shown below, and hit connect.

Finder Conect to Server Dialog

Related Solutions

Source .profile and .bashrc on ssh login without tty

Bash has special provisions in its source code to source ~/.bashrc when it's invoked by rshd or sshd. It's a compilation option, which given your experience seems not to be turned on under OSX.

If you're logging in with a key, you can (ab)use the command= option in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. A key with a command option is good only for running the specified command; but the command in the authorized_keys file runs with the environment variable SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND set to the command the user specified (empty for interactive sessions). So you can use something like this in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (of course, it won't apply if you don't use this key to authenticate):

command=". ~/.profile;
         if [ -n \"$SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND\" ]; then
           eval \"$SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND\";
         else exec \"$SHELL\"; fi" ssh-rsa …

Note that I put line breaks above for legibility, but this actually needs to be all on one line.

How can I set environment variables for a remote rsync process? may have other helpful suggestions.

Screen sharing fails to connect

ssh into the remote Mac and kill the screensharingd daemon.

$ ps ax | grep screen
1234   ??  Ss     0:00.02 /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/screensharingd.bundle/Contents/MacOS/screensharingd
$ sudo kill 1234

It works for me. I have Mac OS X Lion on both local and remote computers.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Source .profile and .bashrc on ssh login without tty

Screen sharing fails to connect

Related Question