X11 Tunneling and Web traffic from local Machine
 

Hey All!

This forum has been more than helpful in the past so I'm looking for a bit of guidance now.

I have a Windows XP laptop I use all over, and at home I have a Suse 10.0 machine.

I am able to use cygwin to run an xwindows system on my laptop and tunnel it to my home pc. However, it is obviously very slow.

I was wondering if there was a way to take the X service load off the suse machine by running some kind of X service in windows and then just tunneling my http traffic.

What I mean is right now I use cygwin, startx, then ssh -X to my home machine. Like I said, it's very slow. I think it has to do with all the X traffic. So is there a way to lighten the traffic by running x11 on windows and just tunneling my http traffic?


For those of you who reccommend vnc, thats a great option but I can't support multiple users at once, so vnc is not a viable option...

I thank you all for your support.

Mark

Actually, I think you have it backwards. Currently, X does run on your machine, and the problem is that in modern X apps the connection is very inefficient; so when they connect to your computer over the network the response is very slow. The solution actually is to not have X over the network and instead to have something like VNC or NX act as X on the remote machine and then VNC or NX transfers the information in an efficient way between the computers.

I don't know what you mean by you "can't support multiple users at once". Besides VNC, you can try NX (FreeNX server for Linux), which is much faster than VNC (and up to 70 times faster than X), and has encryption and the standard user login mechanism.

Tunnelling http traffic is quite possible: you'll just need to set up a squid proxy on your home machine and then you could forward that port from your laptop.