How to set up an SSH tunnel

Ok, I want to figure out how to set up a secure connection between my mum's iMac (with Tiger) in England, and my iMac (Leopard) here in Germany, so I can help her out with problems she might have by actually accessing the GUI on her machine.
I'm sure some of you will point out that screensharing between two Leopard machines is easy via iChat, but my mum doesn't want to fork out more money for the Leopard upgrade.
Another option is setting up a VPN, but neither my router or hers have that capability, so it seems that SSH is the only option, can anyone help?

Have never done it myself. I think VNC has a Mac version though..

** Just googled and found this...could be useful

http://howto.diveintomark.org/remote-mac/

You might look at trying CoPilot.

Google is your friend

And the best, fasest, and best of all free application to do this is Putty

Quite useful, but made less clear by Windows.


I want to try and crack the SSH nut, but if it proves too difficult, then i'll resort to something like that, thanks for the suggestion.


Windows only.

Not... - Putty For OSX

Ok, thanks DK

Why on earth would you want to run a Mac port of Putty? OS X comes with an ssh server and client.

Anyway, forget about an ssh tunnel. Do this instead:

Install Share My Desktop on your Mum's Mac. Tell your Mum to go to this page which will tell her her IP address. On her router, forward port 5900 to her Mac. Get her to run SMD. It runs a VNC server with a random password. Using a VNC client on your Mac, connect to her IP address and enter the random password to login. When you've finished, get her to quit SMD. Cancel the port forwarding. Done.

If you decide that you must tunnel VNC under ssh, here's a full set of instructions that'll work under Tiger. As you can see, it's way more complex, and unlike the method above involves you knowing an ssh enabled logon ID and its password, rather than the one-time password used by SMD.

NB publicly exposed ssh servers must have very strong passwords (over 15 characters, mixed upper & lower case, numbers and special chrs) or they will be hacked quickly, especially for common usernames. That's why I like SMD. If it's off, there's no risk.

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking. Are you just trying display an application on her machine remotely? If it's an application that you can start up from the command line (like xv or gimp or something), then you can just ssh -X into her machine, which allows x11 tunneling. It's slow, but it works.

My information is surely out of date, but she may need to have a static IP in order to do what I said above.

ipj (and DK), people don't usually run ssh servers by default on their home computers. He'd have to get that set up as per response from Wheel. Putty won't help -- it's just a client. Also, remote viewing of X11 windows isn't going to help for the intended purpose of sharing the desktop. He'd need to use VNC or something similar going through the ssh tunnel, or use an easier alternative, again, as posted by Wheel.

(In Tiger) SSH can only tunnel GUI applications that are based on the X Window System. Mac GUI applications, however, are not based on X11--so you cannot use SSH there.

Related topic on macosxhints.com: 10.5: A number of ways to access Screen Sharing

@adrian_t
Read the entire thread again. the OP wants to connect to his/her moms IMAC, which does have an SSH server installed by default.

The ssh server runs by default? I don't think so. Maybe you should read my post again. Maybe you should get a clue. Maybe I should get a life.

The issue isn't running an ssh server: that's installed by default and easy to activate. Likewise, a VNC server is installed and can be turned on easily. The problem is forcing VNC to go via the ssh tunnel. In Windows this can be done by the VNC server, but the OS X versions don't have that functionality AFAIK, hence the obscure Terminal commands and reboots of the second link.

If you forget about the ssh tunnel and use Share My Desktop it is all so much easier. SMD just activates the built-in VNC server and allocates a one-time password. Granted, it's not encrypted, but a hacker would have a hard time extracting useful information from a VNC data stream. You still have to faff about with the router, but you have to do that with Windows as well.

Depending on the Version of VNC being used (There are 2-3 diff companies) the VNC traffic is already sent over an SSL/SSH encrypted link.
Do you really need another layer of encryption?.

logmein.com works great and the free versiosn is all I need. I use it all the time to access remote PCs and Macs. Simple to setup, fast and reliable.

Jono

@Wheel, Dostoyevsky and everyone else, thanks for your tips. I'll try and do the tunnel, in the mean time I think I need to do some revision on Unix.