I am on an XP laptop trying to create a tunnel to a VNC server on a
remote Linux machine. I think I have my laptop configured correctly
(using SSH Secure Shell and tightVNC viewer). I started a vncserver on
the remote machine via an SSH terminal. The whole VNC connection
worked fine, I had a remote desktop and could work just fine.

My question(s) is (are) basically: How can I verify that I am actually
using the tunnel I think I set up? Is there a way to check that I am
communicating securely? Also, it wasn't clear to me that I needed to
set up some sort of SSH action on the remote machine. I don't
administer that machine, so can't necessarily change any settings, but
wondered if I needed to do some sort of 'ssh -R xxx:xxx:xxx' thing
(clearly I am new at this!).

I will gladly provide more information if it's ful. Hope my
questions are clear and would appreciate any guidance or links to
further information. There was a good deal of info on VNC/SSH but all
the setups described seemed quite platform/tool/port/etc dependent.

Thanks in advance...