[FreeNX-kNX] user mode freenx/nx

[Scott Serr]

Al Johnson wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 April 2008 18:59:49 Scott Serr wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> I want to use nx or freenx in two ways:
>> 1. a full remote desktop launchable by the user like vncserver.
>>     
>
> I'm not sure I understand the usage scenario you have in mind.
>   
Our users will often run "vncserver" on a remote Linux box, and then 
connect to it with vncviewer.  Most users just use "twm" because it 
causes less traffic for VNC.  VNC can require a (weak) password to 
connect... it doesn't appear that nxagent/nxproxy can work in that way, 
the wrappers seem to use xauth stuff.  (which I must say seems like 1/2 
of the code of these scripts is just dealing with xauth stuff)
>   
>> 2. a single X client redirect like "ssh -X"
>>     
>
> Bill Alexander was asking about similar functionality about a week ago. He was 
> looking at updating nxtunnel to work with the current version of the libs. 
>   
I've been looking at nxtunnel and nxshell.  I wonder why these fell by 
the side?  I have the latest nxshell from the SuSE repositories.  I'm 
pretty confident it will work with SuSE 10.2... I don't have that distro 
installed though.  I'm trying to get it working on RHEL4.  (our systems 
don't come with netcat or ssh-copy-id, so I had to supplement those...  
and for nxtunnel it wanted netpipe's faucet etc)

Does anyone know of something like nxtunnel or nxshell that currently works?
>   
>> A big constraint...  Assume that we don't have root and can't have
>> sysadmins install this on hundreds of boxes.
>>     
>
> Erm...you want someone other than a sysadmin to install a remote access tool 
> on hundreds of machines? Sounds like a good way to a clear desk and an escort 
> off site to me. Assuming the sysadmin doesn't find you first that is...
>   
I don't want it installed on any machine.  I want it accessible from an 
NFS mount that everyone has access to.  For instance, the default 
install does not have vncviewer, but we have that in a tools directory 
that we can run.  We have realvnc's vncserver on the system, but we 
supplement that with tightvnc's vncserver in our network tools 
directory.  In this tools directory we have newer version of tools or 
tools that are missing from our systems.

I see two install patterns.  ~/NX and /usr/NX.  I want /tools/NX... and 
atleast for the NX components, I'm successful by patching at build time.

Thanks...
-Scott