Hopefully, I'm not being too premature in posting this, I'll have a closer look through past posts, but most of what I see are just problems getting VNC & Gnome (or other window mgr to work).

I have VNC working with Gnome no problems. The only problem is that when I connect with VNC, Gnome comes up and it is _always_ logged in with my (only) user on the server "ernie'. My server is sitting at the welcome to page and I don't need to do anything there.

I can run 'su' on the VNC connection, but its again, always initially logged in with my username. If I go and logout, everything disappears except from my Gnome wallpaper and that is where it sits. I could probably start/restart the vncserver but, I just do a hard reset on the server and everything comes back up as normal.

Anyone with ideas on how to allow login & logout from VNC via a Gnome session? I would also really like it if it would default to not auto logging in from the start (for obvious security reasons).

My application really requires something like this. Its been great-as-is for playing/learning Linux, but now I'm ready for the next step (I think!).

Thanks!

Check out this link:
http://www.sourcecodecorner.com/articles/vnc/linux.asp

That's how it works when you start a VNC server as a normal user. Whatever's defined in your xsession file get's preloaded, you can disconnect and reconnect to resume, but you can't logout a session and expect to see a login manager. From the security point of view it's not that bad, since you need shell access to start a VNC server anyway and you can protect it with a password.

In order to achieve what you want you have 2 choices, either use XDMCP or load the vnc extension for X.

XDMCP is relatively easy to setup but if you're planning to remote access through the internet X11 isn't a very secure and efficient protocol, plus you need to run X server on the clients.

Vnc extension for X on the other hand has a drawback that it's not truely multiuser, ie if you login and disconnect without logging out, if another person connects they'll resume your session. Though that's more of a limitation on VNC itself, you should at least password protect the VNC Server.
For instructions check out this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=244815

Yes vnc can be configured to open with gnome login and password prompt. Once you close the vnc window, your session is gone (even if you do not log out). It also can be configured to support multi users, each user that connects will have his/her own session...

If that is what you are trying to achieve just read the link I posted in my previous reply..

N.