Tuesday 7 July 2009

Faster ssh X11 Forwarding

I use ssh daily to connect to my servers and laptops around my home office. Most of the time I'm using ssh to login and build software, so it's plain and simple command line activity. However, sometimes I need to run an X11 application on a remote machine, in which case I use X forwarding to display the remote X application on my laptop. However, this can be slow. Today I stumbled on the following incantation to speed up X11 forwarding over ssh:

ssh -c arcfour,blowfish-cbc -X -C user@remotehost

Thanks to Samat Jain for this info.

The choice of cipher is based on some performance benchmarks as noted in LaunchPad bug #54180

2 comments:

  1. That was a fantastic tip, thanks! It really made a huge difference - I now have X sessions over my home LAN that run really well, despite using an old 128 MB Celeron-366 PC as the thin client onto my Ubuntu box.

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