The environment at the moment is a selection of windows and Linux (RHEL 4/5 and SLES 10/11) whereby VNC access to the windows boxes works using ultravnc and providing a username/password combination to authenticate.
What is desirable is to use VNC to gain access to the Linux servers with authentication (before the console is displayed) being handled via a username/password combination.
I know that using VNC it is possible to handle this with a generic password or no password at all.
What is the best solution in this case? Is it possible to configure VNC access as desired?
Also beneficial would be having authentication done via pam so that pam_access and other restrictions are used.
Thanks,
Matt.
Best Answer
Although this doesn't directly answer your question about VNC authentication, perhaps a more appropriate solution for your problem would be NX.
Google has released a decent open source NX server in the form of neatx or alternatively there is FreeNX which is also open source but somewhat more complicated and shell scripted in it's implementation. I've had better success with neatx. And of course, there is always the commercial NX server, from the protocol originators NoMachine. The "free" NoMachine NX server is unsuitable for most normal production systems due to limitations (concurrent and number of unique users both = 2) but if you want to pay, those limitations are removed.
Next is the client. My best experience is still with the NoMachine client but I haven't yet tried OpenNX, it was just QtNX that didn't totally satisfy me. Like the server, the NoMachine NX client is only pseudo-free, but there aren't any annoying limitations beyond the license.
Again, it's not exactly what you asked but perhaps a solution worth considering.