Freenx & desktop sharing

[Derek Broughton]

Dennis Kaarsemaker wrote:

> On ma, 2005-10-31 at 15:17 -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> along with the Windows freenx client from NoMachine, and it screams!
                          ^^^^

That should have been the "Windows NX client"...

>> It takes considerably longer to set up the session than VNC, but once
>> connected I can hardly tell I'm not on my own machine.  All this, and
>> the connection's encrypted too.
> 
> It takes longer, because the protocol has several phases to go through:
> * making the ssh connection
> * negotiating parameters for the NX protocol
> * attaching the X session to the freeNX protocol
> * starting the X server on your windows machine
> * attaching the FreeNX input to that X server

Absolutely - I wasn't complaining.  I was assuming that some up-front setup
time was contributing to the fact that, in-use, the connection is much
faster than VNC.  Actually, this morning when I started it, it didn't even
seem to take longer.  I wonder if, once having negotiated the parameters,
it simply skips a lot of that on subsequent connections.

>> The only small problem I had was figuring out what port I had to open
>> in my firewall (7000, I think - I haven't actually tested it, I just
>> turned off the firewall, connected, turned it back on, then looked to
>> see what unusual ports seemed to be in use).
> 
> That's odd...

It didn't seem so odd, to me, but since you think so, here's what netstat
said:

derek at othello:~$ sudo netstat -t -a -p -n | grep nx
tcp  0  0     0.0.0.0:7000     0.0.0.0:*          LISTEN     11788/nxagent
tcp  0  12525 127.0.0.1:5000   127.0.0.1:3374     ESTABLISHED11788/nxagent
tcp6 0  0     ::ffff:142.2.70.53:22   ::ffff:142.2.70.56:2572
  ESTABLISHED11488/sshd: nx [pri

So, obviously it has to have the SSH connection (or an SSL one).  The port
5000 connection is internal, so not a firewall problem, but opening 7000
definitely worked for me today - the firewall was up when I connected and I
had no trouble.

The NX documentation did suggest that if I had a firewall issue, just use
SSL, but that ran into some other problem (which I didn't note), and since
opening 7000 has fixed the problem connecting with SSH I didn't see the
need to follow it up.

Another thing that NX does that VNC never did, is it's using my full
available screen space for the client window (and still with good fonts). 
VNC claimed it could do that, but it was flaky at best.
-- 
derek