If you ever find yourself doing a bit of technical support for relatives over the phone, there's nothing like actually seeing what they are doing on their computer. One of the best tools for such remote desktop sharing is vnc.

Here's the best setup I have come up with so far. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment!

Basic vnc configuration

First off, you need two things: a vnc server on your relative's machine and a vnc client on yours. Thanks to vnc being an open protocol, there are many choices for both.

I eventually settled on x11vnc for the server and ssvnc for the client. They are both available in the standard Debian and Ubuntu repositories.

Since I have ssh access on the machine that needs to run the server, I simply login and then run x11vnc. Here's what ~/.x11vncrc contains:

noxdamage

That option appears to be necessary when the desktop to share is running gnome-shell / compiz.

Afterwards, I start the client on my laptop with the following command:

ssvncviewer -encodings zrle -scale 1280x775 localhost

The scaling factor is simply the resolution of the client minus any window decorations.

ssh configuration

As you can see above, the client is not connecting directly to the server. Instead it's connecting to its own vnc port (localhost:5900). That's because I'm tunelling the traffic through the ssh connection in order to avoid relying on vnc extensions for authentication and encryption.

Here's what the client's ~/.ssh/config needs for that simple use case:

Host server.example.com:
  LocalForward localhost:5900 127.0.0.1:5900

If the remote host (which has an internal IP address of 192.168.1.2 in this example) is not connected directly to the outside world and instead goes through a gateway, then your ~/.ssh/config will look like this:

Host gateway.example.com:
  ForwardAgent yes
  LocalForward localhost:5900 192.168.1.2:5900

Host server.example.com:
  ProxyJump gateway.example.com

and the remote host will need to open up a port on its firewall for the gateway (internal IP address of 192.168.1.1 here):

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 5900 -s 192.168.1.1/32 -j ACCEPT

Optimizing for high-latency networks

Since I do most of my tech support over a very high latency network, I tweaked the default vnc settings to reduce the amount of network traffic.

I added this to ~/.x11vncrc on the vnc server:

ncache 10
ncache_cr

and changed the client command line to this:

ssvncviewer -compresslevel 9 -quality 3 -bgr233 -encodings zrle -use64 -scale 1280x775 -ycrop 1024 localhost

This decreases image quality (and required bandwidth) and enables client-side caching.

The magic 1024 number is simply the full vertical resolution of the remote machine, which sports a vintage 1280x1024 LCD monitor.