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Re: ssh/X with two hops


On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Ehud Karni wrote:

> 1. It allows you to run anything on your office machine and see it on
>    your home machine - not just X11 applications.
> 2. It is stateless - if the communication fails for any reason, you
>    can reconnect and resume your work (like `screen' for ttys).
> 3. You have the options to connect "read only" and have multiple
>    connections.
> 
> I know you can achieve 2 & 3 with Emacs on multiple X's too, but it is
> more complicated, and from my experience it fails more often.
> 

VNC is a good solution for non X11 apps. But with X11 apps you loose the 
advantage of local rendering of text. With VNC every drawing operation
is updated as bitmap which requires a fast connection.  

Point 2 is not achived easily with stock X11 software, so if the stateless
feature is required, then VNC is a good option.

The Read-only feature is a special, seldomly required feature.

The last two point do in my opinion not sum up to such a big advantage 
which would drive me to favor the slow bitmap transfers with VNC over
the slim X11 protocol.   

> You'll still need the ssh to securely connect and tunnel through your
> firewall, but you can disable the X11 forwarding (which is done on your
> gateway machine and is considered security breach by some).

VNC falls into the same "security breach" category as X11 Forwarding and
it is more likely the inexperienced users will setup an uncrypted VNC 
connection. X11 Forwarding is easyto use and always uses a secure channel.

bye
	ago
-- 
 Alexander.Gottwald@s1999.tu-chemnitz.de 
 http://www.gotti.org           ICQ: 126018723


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