RHEL SSH remote desktop VNC

RHEL has particular quirks when it comes to remote desktop connections. For software development on a remote computer, it can be easier to use VSCode over SSH to the remote computer than VNC on RHEL. Here are common considerations for remote desktop access to RHEL and RHEL-derived Linux distros.

For SSH connection problems, consider adding to /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

LogLevel DEBUG

then:

systemctl restart sshd.service

then:

journalctl -f

and try to login. This will print a good amount of information streaming and helps reveal .ssh/authorized_keys permissions issues and more.

Check that firewalld is allowing the desired SSH port through.

tcpdump port 22 -n -Q inout

should show packets from the client–if not the SSH server firewall may be blocking them.

Install GNOME remote desktop server and follow the RHEL Remote Desktop setup. This procedure is completely different from legacy RHEL releases that used TigerVNC and X11, since RHEL now uses Wayland instead of X11.

dnf install gnome-remote-desktop