Re: Vino: proposal for inclusion in GNOME 2.8

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 20:40 +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> Hi,
> 	Vino is a VNC server for GNOME - it allows someone to remotely connect
> to your desktop session using the RFB protocol. More details on the
> original goals of the project are here:
> 
>    http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/remote-desktop.html
> 
> 	To get an idea where Vino *may* be headed in time, read:
> 
>   http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/remote-desktop-2.html
> 
> 	I had originally planned not to propose Vino for inclusion to GNOME 2.8
> until I had a clear idea where Vino was going with things like terminal
> services, security and authentication but perhaps its useful to get this
> in 2.8.
> 
> 	To try out Vino, download it from here:
> 
>   http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/vino/2.7/
> 
> 	and build it. Alternatively, just build it with jhbuild (i.e. jhbuild
> buildone vino). Vino has an optional dependency on GNU TLS, but appart
> from that only requires libgnomeui, gtk+, libglade, GConf etc.
> 
> 	Some points to note:
> 
>   * You need to start the Vino daemon manually for now. You can add 
>     vino-session to your session and it will activate the daemon based 
>     on whether the "Allow other users to view your desktop" preference 
>     is enabled. Alternatively, just start the daemon by running 
>     vino-server.
> 
>     If Vino is included in 2.8, I'll be adding a patch to gnome-session 
>     to handle activating it. At some point we'll have a session manager 
>     that won't require patches like this, though :-)
> 
>   * To connect to your session from another machine just run 
>     "vncviewer mymachine" or maybe use tsclient to run vncviewer for 
>     you.
> 
>   * If built with GNU TLS, support for encrypting the RFB protocol 
>     stream will be built. However, there isn't widespread support in VNC
>     clients for this yet so you could either try and patch[1] vncviewer 
>     from RealVNC 4 or use the Java client in the vino tarball (to do 
>     that point a browser with the Java plugin at http://mymachine:5800)
> 
>     Another point worth noting about the SSL support is that (for now) 
>     it uses anonymous diffie hellman key exchange which still leaves you
>     vulnerable to man in the middle attacks. Using the SSL support you 
>     are only making it more difficult for someone to snoop your session.
>     On an untrusted network, I'd recommend using an SSH tunnel rather 
>     than the SSL support in Vino.
> 
I would really like to see this in GNOME. But if we have a VNC server,
we might need a VNC client also. The best one for GNOME seems to be
tsclient, so it would be wise to add support for RFB protocol encryption
to it, so that it works with vino.

cheers