@acewave: that looks promising.

EMoShunz

Tight VNC is a grat program. It will help a lot of people get tech assistance from their relatives.

[www.isnare.com]

jackattaway2

This is a great thing. A lot of elder people and non-techies would benefit from getting tech asisstance from relatives - if it is easy to use.
[sg.answers.yahoo.com]

jackattaway2

[secure.logmein.com] works well too

acewave

@EMoShunz: The main article references a how-to on one way to access your pc over the interwebs using Hamachi. Another method is to just configure your router/modem to forward port 5900 (the default vnc port) to the IP address of the system you want access to (this is not secure, however).

dfrazee

I have been using this in Tiger 10.4 for almost a year now. What's "new?" i never tried iChat or anything but i use TightVNC to connect to my mini from work.

vermifuge

If you need/want more control over your VNC setup than what OS X offers, try Redstone's Vine Server. For one, it let's you customize which port it listens to.

dfrazee

@armeck: good question. and how about doing it from outside my network out in the www?

EMoShunz

It's like black magic when you can clear your grandparents' print queue remotely because they can't find the place to do it with all the new hardware and software. It's better still to have them get how to do it after showing them just once. It's amazing how much easier it is to remotely control a Mac with these utilities than a pc.

Laura

RONNSPROCKET the way to connect to a PC from leopard is

Go --> Connect to Server --> enter in the server address "vnc://ip address of your pc"

LG

lgalzerano

How about connecting from Ubuntu 7.10 to my leopard iBook? For some reason It refuses to authenticate (it seems to see it, acknowledge it, but then it craps out.

armeck

@Snorbalp: Dang, and here I was all "VNC in Leopard! VNC in Leopard!" Oh well. :)

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor

this would be more impressive if I wasn't already running leopard on vmware on my pc.

dhaberer

@moo083: You could control that on the router level, if your router supports port forwarding.

t3knomanser

Sadly, most of the performance tweaks supported by TightVNC aren't supported by Leopard's screen sharing. You can't change the JPEG compression, you can't change the encoding, you can't switch to 8-bit color, etc.

The performance is pretty good, even without that, but it'd be nice to tweak the settings to get things are responsive as possible.

//VNC is my way around web filtering at work.

t3knomanser

Sadly, this will not work for me because I want to customize the port that I use VNC through. So I will continue using Vine Server....

moo083

@Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor: Nope, its in there. System Prefernces > Sharing > Apple Remote Desktop > Access Privs > (tick) "VNC viewers may control screen with password ****"

Snorbalp

@gina - nope, its in there. SysPrefs > Sharing > Remote Desktop > Access Privs > "VNC viewers may control screen with password"

Snorbalp

@ronnsprocket - download the mac version of Windows Remote Desktop Client, and have at it. This solution allows you to even connect remote drives. [www.microsoft.com]

Snorbalp

@thespazz: Hm, I thought you needed to install a VNC server in Tiger to do this.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor

This is also available in Tiger...

thespazz

:D Great tip!

Any recommended (or upcoming) tutorials on detailed setup of the TightVNC client?

Thanks so much!

tblack

is there anyway to screenshare my pc from leopard. i have used chicken of the vnc, but for whatever reason, it is terribly laggy on my mac pro. I have tightvnc on the pc.

ronnsprocket

Also forgot try playing with the compress methods to suit your needs, Tight and Zlibpure work best for me..

Dorfdad

Been doing this for some time now, works OK the problem is I wish there was a way to turn off the screen wallpaper, resize the desktop (more like RDP does) I have to constantly adjust settings at work and when I get home otherwise its just painfully slow.

Dorfdad

Only problem with this is you can't seem to change the compression/quality, eg when I connect over the internet to my Mac its imposable to control, as every screen refresh is done in true color making it VERY slow.

I think I will probably switch back to Vine VNC as it support compression and you can change the port it uses.

sebf

Awesome tip ... was banging my head trying to figure this one out.

@acewave: Logmein only works with machines upgraded from Tiger I believe. I think there are still problems with clean Leopard installs.

aelver

@dfrazee:
My above post is directed at anyone who wants to change what ports vnc listens to,

ecbtln

@moo083:

You can do this without vine server. All you have to do is edit the file in /etc/services with nano or vi or vim or whatever. With nano it is easy because you can then do control w and type in 5900. You will then see two vnc-server specifications, udp and tcp. Change the port numbers from 5900 to whatver you want and your done. Easy enough. I've been doing this with ssh on 443 instead of 22 because of limitations on the network in work and it works great without any flaws. Notice that when you change this port it also changes the default outgoing port you use. So if you wanted to vnc out to 5900 and you set your vnc server port to 1024, you would have to specify 5900 or else it will say connection blocked because it is trying to connect on 1024.

ecbtln

For the life of me I cannot figure out how to make this work. I was running TightVNC from my office PC to access my Tiger machine running Vine Server, and everything was peachy-keen. Now, however, I can't access my Leopard machine from anywhere except within my home network (i.e., typing "http://192.168.2.5" from TightVNC on home PC brings up home Leopard machine just fine). I have screen sharing turned on, password set, but no dice accessing it from outside my network (router is set up to keep www.dyndns.org updated with current IP, and is set to forward incoming traffic on VPN ports to Leopard machine's IP address). Even Vine Server no longer works. What's the deal here? Help please!

ataylor

As far as Remote Desktop to Windows is concerned, CoRD is a few steps ahead of Microsoft's own RDC. It supports multiple connections, for one thing. I don't think it supports Vista though.

domi

@ataylor: What address are you using when you try to access your system from outside of your network? I'm doing the same thing that you have set up (I use DynDNS, have my router set to forward the correct port to my system, etc). From my work computer, for instance, I type "myname.homedns.org" in TightVNC and the password prompt comes right up.

Another thing that might be holding you back is that your ISP might be filtering or blocking access non-standard ports. I don't know if that practice is still commonplace, but it was to be expected a few years ago when ISP's discouraged people from running servers from their home.

dfrazee

Is it possible to enable the SSH server in Leopard, connect via SSH and enable port forwarding on port 5900. Then open VNC client on remote machine. Would this allow a secure connection?

Jed Taylor

@Jed Taylor: Yes, I've been doing this since Tiger.

If I'm on a mac, I do something like this:
from Terminal.app, ssh my.user@my.domain.com -L 5900:127.0.0.1:5900
$ /Applications/Vine\ Server.app/OSXvnc-server
Then launch Chicken of the VNC and connect to 127.0.0.1 or localhost

A couple nice things about the above steps: Vine Server is highly configurable, allowing me to change from the default port for security if I want. Using a secure shell tunnel means only one point of entry (port 22 or whatever port I decide to set it to). Also, notice that I launch Vine Server after ssh'ing in, meaning I don't have it running at all times -- only when I want it.

From a PC, I'd do about the same, except substitute putty for Terminal.app and UltraVNC for COTVNC. Also, putty allows you to configure tunnels through the GUI (convenient for setting up profiles where you might have *many* tunnels that would be cumbersome to type by hand every time) Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that I was able to VNC into localhost on a mac (did it this weekend from the Apple store to my home PC -- both Leopard machines) but on a PC, you need to create a secondary loopback adapter (10.0.0.1), bind your tunnel to that, and ssh to 10.0.0.1.

jasmarc

OH, I was also wondering... it seems like you can either do VNC or Apple Remote Desktop, but not both (if you were going to go with Apple's provided VNC and not the 3rd-party VNC server provided by Vine Server) is that right?

Also, does anyone know which protocol iChat's desktop sharing uses? Is that VNC or is that ARD or is it a totally different protocol all together? And if I turn off VNC and/or ARD in System Preferences will I not be able to do iChat desktop sharing?

jasmarc

One last tip I learned, if you connect, type in your password, and it kicks you off straight away, it's probably because you're using too few colors. Turn off 8-bit color ... I read somewhere it only supports 'Thousands'.

aelver