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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

– Live from The Internets since 2003 –

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VNC

12 October 2003

Most of my development work is done on Windows using Microsoft technologies like ASP. I don’t like Windows and I don’t particularly like ASP, so I’ve been working at building up my PHP skills and have a medium-term plan to switch to using a Mac if possible. I certainly don’t want anything to do with Longhorn when it’s finally released, so I’ll want to switch long before that.

Anyway, down at the other end of my desk sits a linux server running Debian with Apache, PHP and MySQL. As its monitor is becoming less and less reliable I decided that it would be a good idea to install some sort of remote desktop tool so that I can admin the server directly from my Windows machine. Enter VNC.

I’ve used VNC a few times before, but have never set it up myself. Today’s task was to get VNC up and running on my Debian machine so that I can sleep easy and save my eyes from the wibbling monitor of doom. A quick apt-get confirmed that my machine already had the latest version of the VNC Server installed. Getting it working was as simple as typing vncserver to start the server, and then choosing a password to authenticate remote sessions. Job done!

That was so easy that I began to get cocky. After a quick bit of Googling, I now have a VNC Server running on my old iMac too.

Does it work? You betcha (300k JPEG). What you are looking at is a Windows XP desktop running two VNC sessions. The forground session is Safari running on Mac OS X. The session behind is Konqueror running in KDE on Debian. Rejoice.

- Drew McLellan

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Comments

  1. § Jacob Patton: Would VNC work the other way around, too? That is, could I set it up so I can view my Windows desktop on my iBook? I’d like to be able to set up an old box as a (Windows 95/98/XP, Linux) testbed and view the screens of each on my Mac-connected monitor.

    I suppose I would need to dual-boot the test box, though....
  2. § Drew: Jacob- yes it will.

    Get the server for Windows here and the client for OS X here.

    It works well!
  3. § Brian: I agree it works very well cross platform but don’t forget that in a ”pure” XP environment remote desktop is much faster..

    I use a combination of both on my little network here and have now disposed of 3 monitors and 1 KVM switch
  4. § Drew: Brian- yes, but that’s kinda academic in a mixed environment. There is Microsoft Remote Desktop Client for OS X, but it obviously requireds a machine running Terminal Services, or I think it works with XP Pro too.
  5. § Brian: You are quite correct, I have the RD client running in OSX against XP Pro - works fine, but feels really strange...
  6. § Drew: Indeed. Am I right in thinking that it locks out the XP Pro machine whilst a remote user is connected? Enforced single user.
  7. § Brian: Absolutely, just one at a time. Although a local XP user can grab it back again automatically terminating the remote OS X session; endless fun eh?
  8. § Jesse: I was just complaining about VNC a couple days ago.. but I have never given it a try on OS X, just on old RH boxes. The *nix types I work with curse it often but I have no real feeling about it yet... I think I now have something to do while killing time tomorrow...

    Anybody using it to help administer an OS X office?
  9. § Dysfunksional Monkey: Just something else which might interest you - if you’re looking at working with Linux/PHP/Apache...

    http://www.webmin.com/

    Nice to hear you’re moving away from ASP and over to PHP. You won’t regret it!
  10. § Drew: ”Moving over to PHP” might be too strong a phrase! I’m looking to become fully competent in PHP so that I can work with it professionally.

    I’m getting really frustrated with it’s crappy XML implementation at the moment, but I’ll post more about that later.
  11. § Tseki: I have just recently installed esvnc on all me windows 98 pc at my work here. Now my problem begins where I want to see the remote pc before the remote machine goes to windows desktop. you see we are running Novell client for our network and the users has to log in there first before going to windows. Now my problem is how do I setup VNC to start before Novell starts.
  12. § Robert Moldenhauer: Multiple session remote desktop was built into and then taken out of XP Pro, so you just have to have the right version of termsrv.dll and make a registry change. I’ve been using it for about a year and it works fine. I lost the web page but just google multiple sessions and remote desktop and you’ll find it.
  13. § wil: hi guys well im not a mac user however my wife is, and i love messing with things, one day my wife asked me if i can help her out with her computer problem at work, so ok here it goes, they use OSX server with router, now the question is how do i set up REMOTE ACCESSING on the computer?, so my wife could work from home any chance any of guys would be willing to give me a STEP by STEP how to set up remote accessing? Thanks to those who would reply
  14. § mendel:

    1. problem:
    my father works in the northsea, on their network they block all outgoing ports except 80.
    At home i’m running my apache on 10.0.0.3:80 (router NAT is pointed to this ip:port), his machine is running realvnc-java on 10.0.0.4:5900.
    2. question:
    Is there any way he can access his java-vncserver on 10.0.0.4:5900 through my webserver on 10.0.0.3:80?
    (here’s a theory I have: northsea:80->my-wan-ip:80->10.0.0.3/java-vnc/forward.php:80->10.0.0.4:5900 – meaning, that there may be a php-script or whatever that connects them in the middle (get’s the 10.0.0.4:5900 java-vnc back to 10.0.0.3/java-vnc/forward.php:80) so he can control his box that way) sortof like a web-based vnc-bouncer, if you catch my drift?

  15. § mendel:

    I guess there is no activity here :/
    I’d love to get a solution to my prob :/

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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