X11 display on a wireless client

[flex_94040]

I would like to diplay X windows on my machine at home. Problem is that I am using a wireless network at home which shares the internet connection with my server. I can display X on the server but not on my laptop which is not "visible" for the rest of the world. For applications such web browsers and ssh this is not a problem but for X display it is since I do not know how to set the setenv DISPLAY on the remote machine (not the server at home). Any suggestions?

Thanks,

[hayne]

You need to be more clear in describing what you are trying to do and describing your setup.
I understand that you are trying to run an X11 program on one machine and display it on another. Which machine are you running the program on? Which machine are you trying to display it on?

[flex_94040]

Originally posted by hayne
You need to be more clear in describing what you are trying to do and describing your setup.
I understand that you are trying to run an X11 program on one machine and display it on another. Which machine are you running the program on? Which machine are you trying to display it on?

Hi Hayne,

Sorry for being unclear. I emailed this late last night ... Ok the setup is as follows. I have a 2 CPU G4 (Jaguar + X11 + Fink ..) at work (call this machine A) connected to a network of unix machines which I use for my research. I have exactly the same machine at home (machine B) connected via a cable modem. I configured B to be an airport base station to share the internet connection. The question I posted is regarding machine C, which is an arbitrary machine in the wireless network running X windows and sharing the internet connection of machine B. My question now is how can I display X applications running on A or say on any other machine on the web (that is not machine B) on C? Problem is that the IP/machine name of C is not known to the rest of the world (except to B I guess ....) implying that I can not set the setenv variable to point to the screen of machine C. I hope this information is more helpful.

I am aware that I am a "spoiled" guy with so many MACS but I guess I am lucky man ...

Thanks!

[sao]

Not sure this will help you, but I use TightVNC with ssh to connect two of my machines. Maybe you check the following links:

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7874&highlight=TightVnc

http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/sshvnc.html

[hayne]

I haven't tried it myself, but I think what you need to do to get your laptop's X server available to an outside machine is to use "port mapping". This is something which is available on the user interface for the Airport Base Station but I'm not sure how you would do it on a software base station like you say you have set up. I'm sure there is a way via the command line but I'm not (yet) familar with the commands for this. But conceptually what you want to do is tell your software base station that anything that comes in on a specifed port should be forwarded to your laptop. You can find out which ports are used by X11 by looking around elsewhere on these forums or the wider web. Searching around for "port mapping" should find you instructions on how to do that via the command line.

[corinthian]

flex_94040,

Have you tried simply ssh'ing to the remote host? If you can ssh out from Computer C to Computer A, you should be able to simply type "ssh -X -l username remote.host" to allow ssh to automatically forward the x11 display from work to home.

If you've tried this, and are finding that ssh isn't working over NAT at home, you should be able to either set a rule in ipfw to allow ssh through, or alternatively, perhaps you could set up your home machine to forward your ssh connection explicitly, as outlined in this tip. (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030130054733106)