NewsForge: VNC: Virtually There and Back Again

“Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is an unsung treasure of the
open source world — a simple and useful tool for accessing remote
computers. Now that I’ve had the chance to play with VNC I’m hooked
on it.

“Most people who are used to a Unix-style environment know that
a machine can be reached over the network at the shell level using
utilities like telnet or ssh. And some people realize that X
Windows output can be redirected back to the client workstation.
But many people don’t realize that it is easy to use an entire
desktop over the network.

“VNC is inherently a client-server technology. On the remote
machine, the server software is started. It is the job of this
software to serve up the machine’s desktop to the network. On a
different machine, the client software resides. Someone sitting at
the latter machine can use the VNC client to connect to the VNC
server and see the full desktop of the remote machine. VNC
communicates over the AT&T-developed Remote Framebuffer (RFB)
protocol on multiple operating systems, including Windows…”

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