Tunnelling RealVNC over a firewall with OpenSSH

Occasionally, I will use RealVNC to connect to my machine back home. And then, something strange started happening. I wasn't able to connect to my machine back home using VNC. I thought it could be a firewall block, so I decided to set up a SSH server at home. After scouting around, I came upon OpenSSH. I downloaded it and installed it.

Here's how I set it up on the server.

  1. Created 2 users, unknown1 and unknown2.
  2. Host restrictions: Allow only these IP addresses and entered specific IP address.
  3. Disable telnet command shell, and SSH command shell, by pointing to an invalid file
  4. Tunnelling: Allow both local and remote port forwarding.

On the client, I ran putty and connected to my SSH at home.
In the client, I enabled SSH port forwarding so that it listened to port xxxx and forwarded to my server's yyyy port. I then connected VNC to 127.0.0.1's xxxx port, which putty then forwarded to the OpenSSH's server's yyyy port, which my RealVNC server is listening on.

Published Wed, 22 Dec 2010 @ 9:26 PM by chuacw
Filed under: ,

Comments

# Reverse tunnelling VNC from home to office

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 10:36 AM by Chee Wee's blog: IT solutions for Singapore and companies worldwide

In the blog post Tunnelling RealVNC over a firewall with OpenSSH , I shared how I used SSH to carry VNC

Leave a Comment

(required) 
(required) 
(optional)
(required) 
Enter the following code to ensure that your comment reaches the intended party:
Enter the numbers you see in the image: