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).
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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