Tunneling into Nevis to a Windows PC running VNC Server

In general Windoze PCs are not exposed to the outside. Therefore you need to set up a tunnel into the PC. shang is a logical host for this. The general purpose one-liner to set up the tunnel is:

 ssh -L:5900:columbia-hi:5900 shang.nevis.columbia.edu 

Replace "columbia-hi" with the host you are trying to connect to inside nevis. The extra ":" at the start of the -L argument is needed because shang has two ethernet interfaces, and without the : the tunnel will listen to port 5900 on the internal interface (":" causes the tunnel to listen to all interfaces).

The leading 5900 port number is the one on shang that you need to connect to. You may change that port if 5900 is already in use (but remember to use the non-default value when running vncviewer, see the manual for more detail).

If you run this command on shang itself, then you can connect to the vncserver on columbia-hi with the (linux) command:

 vncviewer shang.nevis.columbia.edu 

If you run the ssh command on your localhost, the following should work (assuming you don't have vncserver running):

 vncviewer localhost  

Alternatively, you can skip all this if you are running the vncviewer from a linux-based machine, since the command line version includes the ability automatically set up a tunnel:

 vncviewer -via shang.nevis.columbia.edu columbia-hi

See the man page for more details.

-- DavidWinter - 06 Dec 2008