pown

I've written before, perhaps ad nauseum, about accessing a remote Ubuntu machine.  I've also been burned with the lack of security in the out of the box solution that comes with Ubuntu.  I've since heard of another product that does the job a great job providing secured remote access.  It's called FreeNX.

Ok.  After looking at my previous post it might be easy to piece together what this is going to be about.  The bad news is that (like 100% of everyone that has a internet connection) someone tried to pwn me.  My saving grace is that the attempt left lots of footprints that I could see.  This really made me pay attention to security on the web and how vulnerable I really was.  Do I run super secret clandestine ops on my computer?  Nope, I just have an IP address and a fairly common ISP.

Many folk often need to access a home computer from Work or some remote location, myself included.  If you're connecting a Windows Machine to a Windows Machine it is fairly easy. The protocol that talks between two Windows boxes is known as RDP and works well out of the box.  The story is a bit different when you move to Ubuntu (or Linux in general actually). You need to use a protocol called VNC and it is not at all secure on its own.  

In Ubuntu you also don't want to rely on the built in Remote Desktop feature from the Administration Menu, that is somewhat lacking in security allowing one to get p'owned... more on this later...

This post will look at connecting to your Ubuntu home computer from a remote location in a fairly secure way.