setting up remote logins?

[PattiMichelle]

Hi:
I want to give someone at work access to my openSuSE 11.0 system (in the office next door) for running numerical simulations - preferably an X windows or KDE interface. The computer is sitting behind a router/firewall on my desk and I guess I have the options of port forwarding or running a dedicated wire from an inside port to their machine. I think an X client like Hummingbird XDMCP (?) would be the way to go, but I'm not terribly technical about the underpinnings of network settings and would like something that's reliable. I don't think VNC is a good way to have multiuser logons. Is this fairly easy to do? Maybe to start I could just do remote terminal logons with batch submissions and ftp access to the results?
Thanks!
Patti

[ken_yap]

Do they have to have a GUI interface? If they are familiar with the CLI, you could give them an account and ssh access. They can maintain a persistent CLI session using the "screen" program even if they log out of ssh.

[PattiMichelle]

Originally Posted by ken_yap

Do they have to have a GUI interface? If they are familiar with the CLI, you could give them an account and ssh access. They can maintain a persistent CLI session using the "screen" program even if they log out of ssh.

Thanks, Ken, I'll have to check out CLI - I've never heard of that before.
Patti

[ken_yap]

Command Line Interface. Basically a ssh terminal session.

[BotKeeper]

Originally Posted by PattiMichelle

Hi:
I want to give someone at work access to my openSuSE 11.0 system (in the office next door) for running numerical simulations - preferably an X windows or KDE interface. The computer is sitting behind a router/firewall on my desk and I guess I have the options of port forwarding or running a dedicated wire from an inside port to their machine. I think an X client like Hummingbird XDMCP (?) would be the way to go, but I'm not terribly technical about the underpinnings of network settings and would like something that's reliable. I don't think VNC is a good way to have multiuser logons. Is this fairly easy to do? Maybe to start I could just do remote terminal logons with batch submissions and ftp access to the results?
Patti

Amazingly, your questions show much insight. There are many ways to solve your problems.

Short summary: I recommend you want to run VNC tunneled through SSH.

XDM (X Display Manager) starts on most machines. However, it is most often configured to not allow remote X session. Using XDMCP is no longer in vogue because the network traffic between the two machines (which includes your password) in unencrypted. You generally don't want to do this anyways, because then your PC would have two window managers (Windows and KDE) battling to control window placement, etc. on the PC. Of course, if you can configure your PC (somehow) to disable the Windows window manager.

With Hummingbird, I typically SSH to the Unix host and enter commands like "konsole &" or "emacs &" or what ever. But that requires you to know what commands you want.

VNC allows you to run two window managers on your PC (I think). Most people at work use VNC. You can use VNC without SSH, but, again, the network traffic is unencrypted. Google something like "VNC SSH Tunnel" and you should find your way.