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Date:      Fri, 17 Feb 2006 10:13:54 -0500
From:      "Scott I. Remick" <scott@sremick.net>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   VNC forwarding over sshd issue
Message-ID:  <yhs2uk09i6bo.kocwno24vgs8.dlg@40tude.net>

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I'm having a weird problem that surfaces sometimes and I am having trouble
pinning down the cause.

What I do is use VNC to remote-control my home FreeBSD box remotely. Most
of the time, this works fine. My home router forwards the external port to
my FreeBSD (6.0R) box. I use PuTTY as a Windows ssh client, and have a
saved session that does the VNC port-forwarding (local port 7000 forwards
over ssh to remote port 5900). I run Gnome (2.12.2) and vino as my VNC
server and connect to my home desktop. Sshd is OpenSSH 2.6.1, PuTTY 0.53b,
TightVNC 1.2.9

But every now and then (like right now), the VNC side of things fails. I
can still connect via SSH just fine. The PuTTY logs show the port is
successfully being forwarded with no error:

2006-02-17 09:38:58	Local port 7000 forwarding to localhost:5900

But when I try to launch a VNC client on the remote PC (in this case,
TightVNC) I get a "Connection closed" error. The PuTTY logs show:

2006-02-17 09:52:42	Opening forwarded connection to localhost:5900
2006-02-17 09:52:42	Forwarded port closed

On the FreeBSD box, no log files seem to get changed after the attempt. In
particular, I check messages and auth.log but doing a listing sorted by
time, I see nothing logged.

What I DO know is if I went home and restarted the FreeBSD box, it'd work.
I've tried -HUP on both sshd and vino-server to no avail. 

I cannot find any docs for vino-server to determine additional params I
could pass it for more-detailed logging. Enabling additional debugging info
on sshd with the -d option seems to not be an option remotely since it
prevents it from going into daemon mode and it'll only handle one
connection, and I can't make the problem surface on-request in order to
test it while at home.

The problem is particularly annoying because I can't MAKE it happen. It
just sometimes does, with no settings changes, and will work again after
rebooting the FreeBSD system, again with no settings changes. SSH never
stops working... it's always the VNC-port-forwarding side of things.

Any suggestions? Somewhere else to look for info? Some way to get more
debug info from sshd or vino-server? Thanks




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