Presently I administer a opensuse 11.0 file and print server via VNC. Whenever I close the VNC window the current session ends. Is there a way to close the VNC window and still have the session active on the server and then go back to check on the progress of operations.
This is useful for unscheduled manual backups or anything that you just want to be able to leave running and then come back to verify or check on it. I can do this on my win2k and winsk8 servers with RDP.
thanks
I think what you’re after is X11VNC, it allows you to connect to the ‘current session’ instead of creating a new one for VNC. (Thus not closing down when you close down the remote VNC client)
It’s available from the OSS repository and needs to be installed on the server.
Thank you, I will try that…
I installed this package and it still does the same thing, is there any extra config files that have to be updated? Or do I have to connect in a specific way?
If I don’t mistake you have to issue ‘x11vnc --forever’ and the program do not close on client exit.
You might also need to specify a port number if you still have the ‘old’ vnc running.
As far as I know VNC will try to use the first free port it finds, starting at 5900. So if you still got the old one running then you might have to specify the 5901 port when trying to connect (e.g. 192.168.1.1:5901).
I’m quite sure it informs you on which port it is running when you start it in a console.
I think I saw a ‘how-to’ for running it as a service as well in the readme, so it’s always available to connect to (even after a reboot).
There are several small catches here but the answer is actually quite trivial (once you see it in action)
As the posters saiad above you need x11VNC running on the server. But bfore you do that you need to have X:0 running on the server this is in my case a KDE session that is started with autologon. X:0 is the session you see when sitting in front of the monitor of the server.
When I require a vnc session I ssh to the remote machine and run x11VNC
It will autodetect the X:0 session and enable you to login in remote.
One catch here is that not all vnc clients can attach to X:0
I use vncviewer from tightvnc
I connect thusly vncviewer 192.168.0.94:0 the secret is in the :0
Unfortunatly tightvnc does not support scaling which can be cumbersome.
There were some detailed post here from Oldcpu whith good ideas for ssh tunneling the session.
Hope this helps