newbie brain hurts. vnc, ssh, router
 

im sure you guys get tired of answering the same damn question. ive read and reread tutorials and other posts, and google. ive been using ubuntu 6.06 for a while now. parents use xp. i want to connect to their desktop to help them with problems. ive read that using ssh is more secure than just a vnc server/client. iv also read that im supposed to forward ports on my router. both computers are behind routers. i assume that i forward ports on both routers. i installed tightvnc on parents xp box, do i need tightvnc on my ubuntu or does ubuntu come with a vnc viewer already. where do i start. do i need to assign static ip's on both parents xp and my ubuntu. any help please, ill go take an aspirin now.

Ok, so I assume that you're not living with your parents, and you want to connect to them over the internet, right?

I'm doing something quite similar to what you want to do, but my experience has been with RealVNC instead of TightVNC. I imagine the concepts/procedures are more or less identical:

1) Yeah, you'll want to assign your parents' XP box a static IP on their home network.
2) Make sure you've installed the vncserver software on the XP box. I know RealVNC has one for XP, I assume TightVNC does too.
3) Set up your parents' router to forward incoming requests on the appropriate VNC port to your parents' XP box. For RealVNC, it's usually in the 5800 and 5900 ranges. You don't mention a specific brand of router, but I've done this successfully with 2 different Linksys routers and a D-Link.
4) If Ubuntu doesn't come with an instance of vncviewer, you should be able to download the appropriate version from the TightVNC website.
5) Once you've got vncviewer running on your Ubuntu box, you should be able to simply type in your parents' URL, and you "should" be able to connect.

I would first make sure you have no problems starting vncserver on your parents' XP box and running vncviewer ON that box just to verify that vncserver IS running.

(BTW, SSH IS more secure, and you can pipe VNC traffic through SSH, but that's another topic ;) )

Hope this helps a little ;)

TightVNC works OK. It is what I use when connecting to my ASP servers, which have to run Win2K. Make sure you get the latest version (just out) because earlier versions are a bit buggy.

My mandriva system came with a program vncviewer which is an adequate vnc client that connects with TightVNC. vncviewer is a bit slow, and I would like to find a faster alternative; the connection is visibly slower on my Linux system than when I use my XP laptop to connect to the ASP server.

I run cygwin on the ASP servers, and have TightVNC set up to only connect to localhost, then I run the SSHD on the servers and SSH in using this script:

ssh -f -L 5901:localhost:5900 servername sleep 20
vncviewer -owncmap localhost:1