Accessing GUI running on AIX using putty

I usually use putty to access my remote AIX server, and then I stat the vnc server on it and connect from my Windows XP laptop using the vnc client to access any GUI like the Oracle runInstaller, etc.

There are time when I would have to connect to a remote AIX machine which does not have vncserver on it, so at that time I would access the GUI from putty using ssh X11 forwarding.

For this the pre-requisite is to have ssh and ssl installed and running on the AIX server. Open SSH and Open SSL can be installed on an AIX 7.1 host following the steps in my earlier post http://shettymayur.blogspot.com/2012/09/open-secure-shellssh-and-open-secure.html

With the help of the instructions on the following links http://mynotes.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/setting-x-display-using-putty-and-xming/ and http://tacomadata.com/node/15 I was able to able to access the GUI (xclock, runinstaller, etc.)

Configuring PuTTY:

Using putty I created an SSH session to access the AIX server.

Configuring Xming:

Install Xming from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/

On starting Xming you should see this at the bottom panned on your Windows XP machine.

 

Configure sshd on AIX:

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config , uncomment and add the following:

X11Forwarding yes
X11UseLocalhost yes
XauthLocation /usr/bin/X11/xauth

Connect to the AIX host test.ibm.com using the ssh session that was created earlier, and call xclock to test. Xclock should be displayed on the Windows machine.

test> echo $DISPLAY

localhost:10.0

test> xclock