Background

Have you ever used an ssh tunnel to try and remotely display an X windowed application and then wished you hadn’t, because the performance was so bad you’d be waiting till next week for the window to come up?

Read on because here’s how you can make this much more tolerable & usable.

Solution

There are 2 configuration changes you can make when connecting 2 systems via an ssh tunnel which make it completely usable. The settings can be applied either via command line switches to ssh or as permanent configuration changes within your $HOME/.ssh/config file.

Method #1: command line switches

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% ssh -c arcfour,blowfish-cbc -XC <server>

Method #2: config file changes

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Host remotey
  User userX
  Ciphers arcfour,blowfish-cbc
  Compression yes
  ProxyCommand ssh user1@ext-dom.com nc host1.int-dom.com %p

References

• Best SSH options for X11 forwarding

NOTE: For further details regarding my one-liner blog posts, check out my one-liner style guide primer.