Virtual Network Computing/VNC/TurboVNC on the DGS Unix machines

  1. Talk to the IT Staff or Tom Hess to have access granted
  2. Start VNC on a unix machine
    1. Login to a unix machine (for example seismicX)
    2. Run “startvnc” from the command line in a terminal
    3. You will receive the message "You are using Display:YY . Tunnel port 59YY from your local machine to this machine"
    4. This session will stay up until you run "killvnc" or the machine is rebooted.
  3. Setup port forwarding from your machine to the Unix machine from #2 above.
    1. Download and install Putty or another SSH client with port forwarding capability
    2. Create a putty connection to seismicX where X is the host you chose to start your session on
      1. Set Hostname is seismicX.geo.utexas.edu
      2. Session Name is SeismicX
      3. Click Save
    3. Configure SSH client (Putty) to forward localport 5900 to the remote machine.
      1. Without closing the putty window above, select Connection/SSH/Tunnels
        1. Source Port: 5900
        2. Destination: 127.0.0.1:59YY (where YY was the port number you were assigned in Step 2c). 
        3. Local
        4. Auto
        5. Click "Add"
    4. Now Go back to the Sessions and click "Save" again. You should now have saved a connection with a tunnel setup.
    5. Go ahead an open the connection and login with your EID/password you'll need the tunnel.
  4. Install and run TurboVNC
    1. Install TurboVNC
    2. Ensure you are logged into the remote host using an ssh client with port forwarding (we just did this)
    3. Run the TurboVNC Viewer
    4. For the server just enter "localhost"
    5. You should now be prompted for  your EID/password and logged into your VNC session. This VNC session will last until you kill it with killvnc or the machine is rebooted.