VNC question

[Daniel Ericsson]

On 9 jan 2007, at 09.59, belinda thom wrote:

> I'm in a bit of a bind---I need to get desktop access to a machine  
> that I don't have physical access to.
> After some googling, I learned about VNCs, and that macports has  
> both a server (osxvnc) and a client (cotvnc).

<snip>

> Has anybody done this type of thing before? Any insight/advice  
> welcome.

Mac OS X Tiger has a VNC server built in. Usually turned on in System  
Preferences -> Sharing -> Apple Remote Desktop -> Access Privileges - 
 > VNC Viewers may control screen with password [         ]

To start this with only shell access have a look at:

/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/AppleVNCServer.bundle/ 
Contents/Support/writesettings

You can create /Library/Preferences/com.apple.VNCSettings.txt  
yourself and a password of "pass" will put  
"6755221D8BA8C5E2FF1C39567390ADCA" in com.apple.VNCSettings.txt. I'm  
not sure what hashing/encryption is used so this is just used to get  
UI access and then you can reset the password to something more  
secure from within System Preferences.

Then following http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302242  
start the VNCServer with `/System/Library/CoreServices/ 
RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -configure  
-clientopts -setvnclegacy -vnclegacy yes`

You might need to set ARDAGENT=-YES- in /etc/hostconfig for the  
VNCServer to survive a restart but I'm not sure.

For the client I'd just download a binary of CotVNC from SF.net,  
http://cotvnc.sourceforge.net/ no need to build it from source with  
macports imo.

- Daniel