One of the common issues we have as a research mathematics department is
how to best work from home on an office workstation. The best solution
we have found is vnc which allows a home user (on linux or windows, I'm
not sure about Mac) to display an office desktop at home and run
programs on that desktop as if you were sitting at it.  This requires a
reasonable network connection, but any DSL or cable modem seems fine.

One big hitch for us has been that for this to work the desktop must
allow outside access to the port on which the server is running and we
normally don't allow that.  In fact without special efforts, which may
be hard under windows, this involves sending a cleartext password.

Fortunately, there is another way to use vnc which greatly ameliorates
the problem.  With the desktop behind a firewall, run "vncserver :1".
Then on the home system run "vncviewer -listen".  Back on the office
destop run "vncconfig -display :1 -connect HOME" where HOME is the
hostname or IP address of the home system.

Since the office desktop intiates the connection the firewall (if so
configured) is happy.  There is no password in this usage.

Now the problem. Unfortunately the vncconfig program in the version of
vnc-server distributed with SL302 has a bug and will not work.  This bug
has been fixed in newer versions though (see
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=114063).  And at
least for us the version of vnc and vnc-server from Fedora Core 2 work
fine under SL302.

--
John Franks <[log in to unmask]>
Dept of Mathematics, Northwestern Univ