Connection w/SSH problem

Vine
1

I’ve started using VNC to connect my Mac to an office PC. I can establish a plain VNC connection without problem, yet when I try to do the same connection over SSH, I get an error message. This is the setup:

ON THE PC:

  • copSSH is installed and I’ve confirmed that sshd is running
  • TightVNC server is configured on port 5900 and running
  • sshd, the TightVNC server, and ports 22 and 5900 are open within the PC’s software firewall and forwarded on the router

ON MY MAC:

  • Vine Viewer is installed
  • I have an item in the Connection List that includes server, port, password, display name, and color depth.
  • ports 22 and 5900 are open in my firewall and forwarded on my router.

When I click the Connect button to connect to this server, it works great. The viewer opens up to the host PC quickly and smoothly. However, when I try to connect securely (entering an account name on the PC, that account’s login password, and the SSH host), I get the error message:

“Failed to connect to __________. Connection failed: Authentication Failure - Local loop-back connections are disabled.” (Instead of ______ it does show the actual server address.)

Using Terminal on OS X, I can enter the command:
ssh -L 5900:127.0.0.1:5900 Office@server-address
replacing server-address with the actual address, I can establish a SSH fine and run commands at the command line without problem. However, I’d prefer to run Vine Viewer over a secure shell, so can anyone suggest where the problem is?

2

I can’t say for sure what the problem is, however the failure:

Authentication Failure - Local loop-back connections are disabled
is actually coming from the SSH process (not Vine Viewer).

Internaly in Vine Viewer we set up the same sort of SSH tunnel command but we also specify that a terminal not be started, your SSH server may not like that configuration. If you can’t enable it at the server level you can try modifying Vine’s SSH profile in Vine Viewer.app/Contents/Resources/ssh_config.

3

Thanks for the tip. I just discovered that by setting the TightVNC server on the PC to accept local loops, that it now works fine, initiating SSH and VNC through Vine Viewer. Thanks for the help!