This article describes in brief how to configure VNC server instances for one or multiple users on a remote machine, how to use VNC to start graphical applications on boot and finally how to enhance security by connecting to the server through encrypted SSH tunnels.

In this article I describe how to configure the SSH server, so that users authenticate using keys, how to generate DSA keys using ssh-keygen, how to configure ssh-agent and finally how to use ssh-add to manage cached passphrases.

I’m writing a VNC mini howto and I got stuck with something. I wanted to do the following with a single command:

create the SSH tunnel (local port forwarding)
execute vncviewer on the local machine
have the SSH tunnel to be automatically closed at the time vncviewer was closed