[vox-tech] Tunneling vnc over ssh

[Henry House]

I normally do this to connect to my VNC session from a remote host with
tunneling through ssh:

ssh wotan.hajhouse.org cat .vnc/passwd > .vnc/passwd
ssh -CNf wotan.hajhouse.org -L 5902:wotan.hajhouse.org:5902
xtightvncviewer :2 -passwd .vnc/passwd \
   -encodings 'copyrect tight hextile zlib corre rre raw'

Surely there must be a more automatic way to set up the ssh tunnel and
authenticate to the VNC server. I have looked at gnome-rdp and KDE's
remote-desktop client, but neither has apparently any concept of vnc
tunneled over ssh. In xtightvncviewer there is an option -via that
appears to do what I want (setting up an ssh tunnel automatically), but
my best effort at using it, 

sudo xtightvncviewer wotan.hajhouse.org:2 -via \
hajhouse at wotan.hajhouse.org -passwd .vnc/passwd

did not work (the process hung, no vnc window appeared). The sudo in
the above was necessary to allow xtightvncviewer to bind to a
privileged port, the need for which I fail to grasp.

Has anybody used xtightvncviewer this way sucessfully?

-- 
Henry House
+1 530 753 3361 ext. 13
Please don't send me HTML mail! My mail system frequently rejects it.
The unintelligible text that may follow is a digital signature.
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