Extreme Remote Desktoping

I'm setting up a Subversion server at the university. I was made an administrator of that server, so I could work on it from home. Unfortunately, access to the remote desktop of the Win2003 server is only allowed from the local network. The solution is to use the VPN, but I've not been able to get it to work. Apparently I need some kind of certificate or group password.

But where would be the fun if everything just worked. As always in ICT, there is another solution. The university library offers a Citrix remote desktop. This is mostly used by law and medicine students, with minimal requirements on their software, and the desktop has been completely locked down, with policies to prevent users from running their own software.

Fortunately they left a hole, to protect the innocent I'm not going to name the culprit, but I can use it as a shell. What a way to use a multi-thousand dollar, software package. So my shell is about 3gig on disk and using hundreds of megabytes of memory and takes a few minutes to start. And you thought Bash was bloated.

From that shell I build an SSH tunnel to my home machine. Through that SSH tunnel I can use RDesktop to get to "my" Windows server.

Using one background Citrix session might be strange, but it's not extreme. Extreme is what happened yesterday.

At my boyfriends place the only computer available to me is a 9 year old laptop with OpenBSD. As far as I know there is no Citrix client for OpenBSD. Furthermore I didn't feel like installing rdesktop. The harddisk is full and slow, every change is painfull. I could have looked for a rdesktop package, but I found a more entertaining way.

First I build a SSH-tunnel to my home machine, and started VNC. Then I connected to that vnc-server through the SSH tunnel. From the VNC-desktop I logged into the Citrix server, and created the tunnel for RDP to my home machine.

At home I could start Citrix on one screen, and run rdesktop on the other. Unfortunately that didn't work with the VNC-desktop. Citrix immediately goes full-screen, and all my attempts to minimise where either caught by the local window manager, or by the remote Cytrix, but not by the window manager running in the VNC server. So I needed another connection to start rdesktop.

To make the picture complete I ran rdesktop over an ssh+X connection.

All in all I used 5 different ways of running applications remotely (Citix, RDP, VNC, X and ssh) and 3 ssh tunnels. Now that's what I call extreme.