Originally Posted by
wr_schwab
Why don't you just use the built in remote desktop that is in XP and Win 7?
There are some security concerns with RDP; it's a good option if you've got some kind of secure personal/office VPN in front of it, or if you're using a SSH gateway (which is what I do), but I'd have some reservations just opening a forward for port 3389 (the RDP default) on your firewall.
Especially with XP, which as of SP2 and when Vista came out -- this might have changed in SP3 -- didn't use an encrypted connection for it by default and was relatively difficult to configure manually to enable encryption. (Unless it was backported, the version of RDP provided by Vista and Windows 7 [and server 2008/2008R2] is also a lot faster on a low bandwidth line - I know there's an updated
client for XP from when Vista came out, but as far as I know the server side of the update protocol was not added into XP or 2003 server.)
There is a free Mac RDP client.
And a Linux one. And while I'm not sure if they're free or not, there are iPhone/iPad and Android clients as well.
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To the original question, I mostly use NX, which runs over SSH; I have password authentication turned off for SSH and one can only get in via a public key. When I need to get to my Windows box remotely, SSH can port-forward for it, or I can run an RDP client on the Linux server via NX.