Viewing the display of a remote computer
 

I just started doing some admin work at a large company. There are about 300 machines on our network running AIX 4 or 5. I realize AIX is NOT Linux, but I hope some people here can advise me since my question is somewhat general.

I have to provide support for users running applications on X11 desktop. Since our facility is quite large, it can be quite a long walk over to the user's desk. I'm looking for a way to view their display from my computer so I can see what they are doing in real time and help them over the phone. I have full root access on all machines. I'm open to any solutions.

We have Exceed on the PC side and also VNC. Perhaps these can do it? How can I tie these together so I can use one of these apps to do the trick? Of course I'm open to other ideas... I was just throwing this out there. I have read about xhost and this sounds interesting, but I don't know if this can do what I'm wanting. It seems many of these apps will only allow me to launch programs on their computers and see the output. This is not what I'm wanting. I need to be able to see the apps they are already running on my computer.

Any advice here would be welcome. Maybe I should have posted this in the general forum? Not sure. But I saw many discussions on this forum about the topic.

Thanks in advance.

VNC or eXceed: both good choices....
 

Hi -

You already said what would have been my top two suggestions: VNC, or some PC X windows emulator (like eXceed or Cygwin-X).

If you need to run GUI applications from a PC, then eXceed or Cygwin is probably the better choice. If your PC is off-site, then X windows over SSH is ideal.

On the other hand, if you need to see the actual user's desktop (and not just run another instance of the same app they have), then VNC is the way to go.

'Hope that helps .. PSM

Well, I started messing around with VNC on AIX but I'm having some trouble. I am able to launch the VNC server on my AIX machine, but when I try to connect with a client, I am only able to get a new x window session. I'm not able to view the screen being viewed by the person sitting at the terminal. Again, all I can get is a new X session as if I'm logging in using Exceed or something. I want to use VNC just like I do between two windows boxes. For example, if I'm on computer A and I use a vnc client to connect to computer B, I can see what is on the display of computer B. Well, not so with AIX.

Any ideas what I should do here? Maybe there is some kind of configuration setting I need to use? Maybe VNC just isn't capable of doing it???

On a side note, I am able to connect from AIX using vncviewer to my Windows PC and I'm able to see what is on the windows display.

What could be wrong here?

what you're seeing is *normal* vnc operation when VNC is operating in a true multi user environment (i.e. not the win32 version). i don't know about AIX i'm afraid but there is x11vnc and x0vnc under linux for sure which do allow exactly what you want. also there's a vnc module in XFree86 / xorg-x11 these days, which preovides the server directly for you within the x config.