[Parti-discuss] Rootless NX

[lars hofhansl]

The usage is:
nxagent -display nx/nx,link=wan:<nxport> :<port> -R  (note that are two ports to specify - which can be the same).

so for example 
nxagent -display nx/nx,link=wan:100 :100 -R
then
nxproxy -S host:100


Note that nxproxy proxies all X request through the local X server, so it needs to authenticate to that X server like any other X client application.

nxagent will then listen on TCP port 4100 for an nxproxy connection and on 6100 for usual X client (the NX base port is 4000, just like the X base port is 6000).

As I said in another reply I have a shell script that handles starting/resuming a remote session, secures that session using the SECURITY extension, establishing the SSH tunnel. All with a bash script and without using any FreeNX/nxclient nonsense. I'll polish that up tonight or tomorrow and post it here.

Once I realized how much NX is like X, I started to like it. NX necessarily needs to add suspend/resume logic, because nxproxy might connect from different physical locations.

-- Lars


----- Original Message ----
From: Antoine Martin <antoine at nagafix.co.uk>
To: lars hofhansl <lhofhansl at yahoo.com>
Cc: parti-discuss at partiwm.org
Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2009 5:40:14 AM
Subject: Re: [Parti-discuss] Rootless NX

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Hi Lars,

lars hofhansl wrote:
> I have since discovered that NX can be used in root less mode as well, and that all of the complexity of FreeNX (or NoMachines server)
> and NX client, and the cumbersome authentication (nx user and then the real user) is not needed to use NX.
> 
> All one has to do it start
>   nxagent -display nx/nx,link=wan,...:port :port -R
> on the remote (client) machine, and
>   nxproxy -S machine:port
> on the local (server) machine. If you want secure communication just use SSH to establish a tunnel (display port + 4000 is used by NX),
> and use localhost:port on the local server.
> 
> No FreeNX, nxclient, public key huh hah, or anything additional indeed is needed.
I was really hoping that this would work... As I've given up before on
figuring out the madness that goes on in nxserver.

Unfortunately, -display is not allowed with nxagent:
Error: Aborting session with 'Unable to open display 'nx/nx,link=wan''.

So the best I can do is this:
nxagent -geometry 1024x768 -terminate :250 -R
nxproxy -S 127.0.0.1:2250

But then nxclient complains about wrong authentication...
So I'm stuck. Any ideas?

> nxagent acts as an X server (just like Xvfb, Xnest, or Xvnc), and any X application can then be used on the remote machine using the given display port.
> 
> That is all that is needed to park and forward windows just like with Xpra. A little bit trickery is needed to handle nxagents 
> resume/suspend logic, but on the oher hand that allows changing encoding/caching behavior between suspend/resume cycles.
Any chance you could expand on that?

I once wrote a client based on nxcl, and that was just as flaky as the
rest... Resume kinda worked - most of the time!

Cheers
Antoine

> Anyway, this is not to diminish the ingenuity of Xpra. I just found that using NX this way (with a bunch of simple bash scripts to set the SSH tunnel),
> is just as simple as Xpra, windows-aware as well, and performs (honestly) far better over low bandwidth links. 
> 
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