After reading David Glassborow's blog on CoRD (a Macintosh application to access Remote Desktop sessions), I decided I needed to document how to use SSH and VNC on a Mac client to access a Windows server. The basic steps are: Create a connection to your server via SSH, Create a tunnel to use over the SSH connection, and use your VNC Viewer over the SSH tunnel.

SSH

I already have SSH set up on the Windows box, using SSH Secure Shell, so I'll just focus on how to get the Mac connected to it. The application I like best right now is Fugu, a freeware, open-source application from the University of Michigan. You need to create a tunnel in Fugu by selecting the SSH | New SSH Tunnel menu item. Once selected, you fill in:

• The remote server's IP address in "Create Tunnel to" (e.g. 192.168.1.76)
• The remote port number for the VNC Server (by default: 5900)
• The local port number that you will use to detect when TCP/IP traffic should be forwarded to the remote server over this tunnel
• The external IP address of your home PC in "Tunnel Host"
• The Username that you will use to login to the Windows server
• The default port for SSH communication, i.e. 22

Once you have all of this set up, and press Start Tunnel, you will have an SSH connection and tunnel running to the Windows box on the other end.

VNC

Now that SSH is setup, we need to connect VNC to the host machine. I'm using the RealVNC viewer for Mac OSX, and it seems to work alright. All you need to do is connect to 127.0.0.1:1 in your VNC Viewer. The 1 tells VNC viewer to run on port 5901, which was the port we wanted to forward to the host PC. I do get a warning message about needing to enable Protocol 3.3 option, so I'll look into setting that on the server since I'm running UltraVNC there. I've also noticed a very significant slow-down when running over SSH compared to running a direct VNC connection to the host PC.

Another option is to run the Java version of VNC Viewer from TightVNC. My limited testing showed that it was an acceptable alternative. Unfortunately, the VNC application on the Mac that everyone talks about, Chicken of the VNC, doesn't work in my setup. I get a rectangle encoding error when connecting to my remote host.

Copying files

One reason I chose to use Fugu is that you can also use it to copy files between the remote host and your local machine. File copying over SSH is done by using the standard SFTP and SCP applications, which Fugu supports. If you absolutely do not need file copying capabilities, then JellyFiSSH) seems to be the SSH application that people talk about a lot.

Another promising way to copy files is by using MacFusion. MacFusion lets you mount a virtual disk on your OSX system and interact with the volume like any other disk. You need to install MacFUSE first, in order to use MacFusion. In the future, I'd probably go with MacFusion and JellyFiSSH, but I was never able to get MacFusion to successfully mount the volume (Error message: "The folder "xyz" could not be opened because you do not have sufficient access privileges.". The credential information I entered was the same as for Fugu and other SSH connections that I have used in the past, so that doesn't make a lot of sense. The log files were less than helpful on the Mac and Windows side, too. On the Mac side, it simply reports "failed to detect remote user ID", and the Windows side didn't show anything in the Event Viewer, despite numerous setting changes in the Local Policy application).

Other Information

This is a good screen cast on how to set your Macintosh up as a VNC server, and walks you through several other general topics. JellyFiSSH and Chicken of the VNC are highlighted in this video.