Remotely Enable Remote Desktop on Debian

It so happened, as I was working from home last Friday, box there at office had only ssh enabled, but was in need of remote desktop badly [ But default it’s not enabled ].

Below is the simple script that one needs to run on the box, after ssh to enable remote desktop connection remotely i.e via SSH :

Set appropriately, assuming 0 here

display=0

Need the machine-id

read -r machineid < /var/lib/dbus/machine-id

source the .dbus for the required variables

. “$HOME/.dbus/session-bus/$machineid-$display”

export the variables sourced above

export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID \
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_WINDOWID

Enable remote access

gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled true

Disable prompt one connection.

gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/prompt_enabled false

Disable view only.

gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/view_only false

After which any vnc client would help us to connect to the box and later the permission can be changed as per the need. Happy hacking! :)