single linux box on dsl?

William Hooper whooperhsd3 at earthlink.net
Fri May 14 14:10:53 UTC 2004


Jeremy Brown said:
[snip]
> That's true...I guess I should have said "each VNC session can only do
> one thing at a time".  In order for N users to have separate VNC access
> to a machine, you'd have to start at least N VNC servers on it, and
> assign ports/passwords to each user.  This quickly ends up being a
> hassle in my opinion, since the equivalent X forwarding setup requires
> almost zero configuration.
>
> Also, AFAIK each VNC server requires a completely separate running
> instance of X, which can gobble up your memory quickly.  Again, the
> equivalent X forwarding setup only takes as much memory as the client
> application needs.

If you are willing to give up persistent connections, VNC can also be set
up to run out of xinetd to work around assigning ports/passwords to users.
 At that point, though, you are losing the big advantage of VNC and X
forwarding starts looking better.  And if you are running over an insecure
network so you need to tunnel that VNC through SSH, then X forwarding
should really be considered.  On a secure network where encryption isn't
required though, it still can be a trade off.  For example, VNC has a
smaller client footprint than X on MS Windows clients.

It basically comes down to your needs and usage.  It just proves the Unix
adage that there is more than one way to do everything.

-- 
William Hooper





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