Blog dedicated to Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite) Technology; covers Apps Architecture, Administration and third party bolt-ons to Apps

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Running vnc over ssh in extranet

In our new extranet setup, we have two servers in the DMZ which can be accessed through a jumpbox server from the intranet. The only protocol allowed between the jumpbox server and the extranet servers is ssh. Till the global URL being assigned to the extranet application tier is live, there was no way to test if everything was setup correctly on the extranet tier, as we could not access the server through http port from intranet. If I ran vnc on the extranet server, I couldn't access access it from jumpbox because VNC port is not open in firewall. I did a little research and came across this URL: http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/answers/vnc-thru-firewall-via-ssh.txt

You can tunnel vnc over ssh by following the steps given in the above URL which boils down to this.

1. Start vncserver on extranet tier by typing: vncserver :5
2. On the jumpbox server type:
ssh -v -l 5905:extranet_hostname:5905 extranet_hostname
3. Start vncviewer on jumpbox server and access localhost:5. This will redirect you to the extranet server over ssh and connect you to vnc running on extranet server on port 5
4. Create a file test.htm in $COMMON_TOP/portal/$CONTEXT_NAME directory with the text "You have reached extranet server

No comments: