On some of the monitoring servers I install, KDE is installed and running. For remote management, it is nice to connect to it remotely via Windows XP host. To do so, I did the following:
- On the monitoring server, edited /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and changed X11Forwarding to yes. This is necessary for getting DISPLAY set properly.
- Reload sshd after change in setting: /etc/init.d/ssh restart
- Downloaded and installed Cygwin. During installation, I made sure that under the X11 heading, that the xorg-x11-base package was selected
- Started Cygwin with the desktop icon
- In my Cygwin home directory: cp /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc .xinitrc
- In my Cygwin home directory, Started the xwindows process with: startx
- In the new GUI window, connect to the monitoring server with: ssh -Y -l username serverip
- It is possible to run 'startkde' but on my setup, currently, it doesn't appear to work quite right, but I can run individual XWindows based programs by starting them with their command line names
vBulletin was helpful in troubleshooting some connectivity issues.
Government Security has some more info on Cygwin, X11 Forwarding, and SSH. The site was either copied to or from a Linux Journal article.
For using vnc and securely remoting vnc, Debian Administration is helpful.