If I have 3 machines, can I have a VNC Client running on MACHINE1, talking to a VNC Server on MACHINE2 and control the screen on MACHINE3 ? As in:

MACHINE1 ---> MACHINE2 ---> MACHINE3
(vnc client) ---> (vnc server) ---> (x session I want to control)


My issues is that I cannot run a VNC Server on MACHINE3. So basically, I'm sitting at MACHINE1 and need to interact with MACHINE3's desktop, menus, widgets...etc..etc.

I'm currently using x11vnc since I need to be able to control screen ":0".


Thanks in advance!

So why cannot you install VNC server on machine 3?

This will work, but will be very slow.

You can, depending on how the x session on machine 3 is controlled from machine 2; ie, via x forwarding through ssh, or via xdmcp (using xephyr or xnest)...

cheers,

It was actually relatively easy.

Running my VNC Client on node1.

Running my VNC Server (x11vnc and realvnc respectively) on node2 as:
"x11vnc -display node3:0 -noshm"
or
"x0vncserver -PasswordFile=/path/to/passwd -display=node3:0"

On node3, make sure you:
1. Ran a "xhost +" on the node
2. Allow X forwarding. On my distro, Fedora 8, I had to go into "/usr/share/gdm/defaults.confg" and add the line "DisallowTCP=false".
This is for gnome, not sure about KDE or other, however.

Like you all had said, performance took a bit of a hit as network was pegged a bit but it was very usable on my little 3 node test network. x11vnc performed much better than x0vncserver, however.