Is there anyone here who’s ever setup a VNC server with a desktop environment on a VPS and interacted with the remote computer thru a laptop?
yeah i always do this with tigervnc server on X11. create a vncpasswd file and place xinitrc on ~/.vnc/xstartup, then run
vncserver :1to create X11 display :1 and vnc server on port 5901. if you want to start vnc on a (physical) session already running, you can runx0vncserver. there’s alsox11vncbutx0vncserverfeels much faster for me.Why not rdp? Or x2go
Yes. I have a container on Linode which I can access via VNC. However, it’s important to remember that VNC is NOT encrypted. So, you really should configure SSH first and then tunnel VNC through that and/or use something like NoVNC and stick that behind an NGinx reverse proxy with TLS. Don’t just hang VNC out on the open internet, that’s asking for trouble.
As for setup, I’m using TigerVNC from the distribution’s package repository and minimal configuration otherwise. The VNC port is only exposed to 127.0.0.1 and NoVNC is running on NGinx. NGinx is also only exposed to 127.0.0.1 and I use SSH to pipe a local port on my desktop to the NoVNC port on the container.
It works, but it’s also a bit memory hungry and I do run into issues with memory exhaustion and the kernel killing the VNC service from time to time. I’m just too much of a cheap bastard to pay for a bigger instance than I already am.
