[SunRescue] 'X' software to connect MS Windows to Solaris?

[Gregory Leblanc]

On 15 Jan 2001 18:27:38 -0500, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 10:54:34AM -0800, Brian Dunbar wrote:
> > Background - we're a PCB design firm, 60-40 NT-Solaris.  The 'trend' is to
> > migrate the Solaris boxes to a rack, give everyone NT on the desktop, and
> > make them use an X-Server (client) software to connect to the unix.
> 
> If you have a switched network, you may want to benchmark VNC against an X 
> Windows solution.  VNC seems to eat more network bandwidth, to the point 
> that using it on a non-switched network would not be fast enough.

Really?  I've found VNC to be much nicer over a slow network than X,
especially with my current config.  Right now, I ssh (via port-forward
on the firewall) to my home machine, and re-direct 5905 on my home
machine, through the ssh connection, to 5905 on my work machine.  I
start a vncserver on my home machine (vncserver :5), and start a client
on my work machine (vncviewer -encodings "copyrect hextile"
localhost:5), and I get a nice gnome-terminal, and sawfish running.
Full screen re-draws are slow, but while I'm working on that, things are
pretty smooth, although not quite as nice as they could be.  My ssh
session uses encryption at a compression level of "6".  I've not tuned
that very much, and I'm using the stock vnc, so I think that I could
probably get a lot more performance out of this, if I were to take the
time to do so.  I used to have ssh doing X forwarding, but simple things
like emacs-X11 took a long-long time to start (minutes), and re-draws of
the window were really slow
I also use vnc from my X machine to vmware running on this same machine,
and it's bloody fast.  In fact, it's even faster than using the vmware
window.  I do get some "display corruption" inside of the vnc window,
but I've not investigated that much either.
Later,

    Greg