VNC is "sweet mate!".
I've somewhat belatedly discovered the power of VNC.
For those of you VNC unwashed
out there, such was myself until my recent baptism, VNC lets you run a
user session on a remote server using a simple program which runs on
the client. It basically operates like a remote window manager and
enables you to run a full session on the remote server.
I'd always heard of people
using VNC and had used it myself on numerous occasions to share a
presentation or do a demo of something during a teleconf .... but the
real power of VNC was sitting there in the background, waiting for me
to fall over it. And I'm sure I've fallen, where others of you have
made a beautifully balanced leap.
What's the real power of VNC that I finally discovered?
To me, it's the combination of
being able to run VNC on a server such as one of our Solaris dev boxes
or my spanking new Dell Linux machine, and the magic switch
"-alwaysshared".
By setting alwaysshared on, the
running VNC desktop session on the server remains active when all
clients have left it. By reopening the session, you can get back into
the very same session, running on the server.
What that means to me is that I
can now boot my Linux box into text mode, start an alwaysshared VNC
session and just connect into it from my single laptop whenever I need
it. That means I don't need to use another keyboard, monitor, mouse.
That means I can access my sesssion at work, then go home, DSL/VPN into
work from my home PC and then resume the very same session. Running a
product install is great -- kick it off from work, check in on it at
home using the same shared VNC session.
Aside from the flexibility this
setup gives you, the best place to appreciate this is from a situation
where you have a flaky network which drops out from time to time. I was
using another X emulation package to run a remote X windows session on
my laptop for the dev servers in the US which worked fine until the
network went out and the session just died. Network out, X session
dies, work lost, hair pulled. Start all over again. It was like working
with a Microsoft product, save early and save often ....
So if you aren't a VNC user, take a look at it.
If you are a VNC user, but
haven't yet got a port running on your dev boxes, do it. And read the
man page and discover what "alwaysshared" can do for you.
[Comment from Al Broccoli]
the -alwaysshared switch doesn't have anything to do with being able to
reconnect to a session, this just requires a dedicated VNC server (not, for
example, running from inetd). -alwaysshared means that multiple people can
connect to the session without each user having to request a shared session. You
can do what you're talking about without the -alwaysshared switch. Just start up
a dedicated VNC session on your machine, (eg: `vncserver :7`) then you can
connect to it from anywhere. In fact, I generally use -nevershared so that if I
forget to disconnect on one machine, when I connect from another it
automatically kills the previous connection.
2:22:45 PM 
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