Today I had to use VNC to debug a remote machine, but firewalls were blocking VNC ports.

After I failed to get my VNC client (Chicken of the VNC) to use a SOCKS proxy, I was able to use SSH port forwarding to get it working. On your local machine type:

ssh user@remotehost -L 5900/localhost/5900

This forwards port 5900 on localhost to port 5900 on the remotehost. Then in Chicken of the VNC, open a new connection to localhost. That’s it! EEZ!

It turned out that Xorg was eating all available memory and invoking the oom killer. Sigh.

I guess I could have figured this out without VNC, but I couldn’t reproduce the bug locally, so I watched as a remote user was working on the machine.

Filed under: archive, commandline, howto, ssh, vnc · 0 Comments