OSX and Vine VNC

[locust76]

Hi all,

I'm trying to build a file server out of an older PowerMac G4. I cleared off all partitions on the drive and installed Leopard fresh and updated it to 10.5.8.

This system will sit across my company's campus in our media department, so I need to be able to access it remotely to make administrative changes. Apart from the 5 Macs in the media department, we're 100% Windows here.

Anyways, I tried enabling Remote Management from within System Preferences, which worked, to some extent. The problem is that I couldn't find a way to change the listening port on the Apple VNC server. In addition to that, if I logged in and left the VNC session idle for a minute or two, the server process would freeze up on the G4 and I would lose all connectivity via VNC until I rebooted (something I can't really afford to have happen with a file server).

So, I tried Vine VNC. After fooling around with it and getting stupid "Screen Format not supported" error messages, I finally got it to "work," even as a system service (start on boot with no user logged in). I can log in as the user (with admin rights) fine, but as soon as I log out, the server process exits and I can no longer connect via VNC again (also not desirable for a file server).

How can I get this thing to a point where I can reliably connect, log in, log out and reconnect again whenever I happen to need to?

 

[angelwatt]

I just use the built-in Screen Sharing (activated from Sharing in System Preferences). Though, you should also realize that VNC is unencrypted and very insecure on its own. Connections should only be made through a SSH tunnel if the connection can be seen from the outside.

Most administrative duties can be done via SSH, including doing system updates (see man softwareupdate).

 

[locust76]

I just set up screen sharing and connected fine, but after a few minutes of idle, the process went down the tubes again and now I can't connect. My fileserver would be dead in the water right now, and that's not a good thing.

Can I maybe restart the process via command line?

 

[angelwatt]

When you're not able to connect, is the server itself hanging, or just your machine you're connecting with? If it's only hanging on your side, maybe it's an issue on your side, rather than the server since it's happening with different applications. I've left my connection idle for an hour without issue on a few occasions. I'm not really sure what to check though except maybe checking the Console logs.

 

[locust76]

When you're not able to connect, is the server itself hanging, or just your machine you're connecting with? If it's only hanging on your side, maybe it's an issue on your side, rather than the server since it's happening with different applications. I've left my connection idle for an hour without issue on a few occasions. I'm not really sure what to check though except maybe checking the Console logs.

No, it's Mac-side. When it hangs, I can pull up the list of processes either locally with the Activity Monitor or remotely via SSH and ps aux, and the AppleVNCServer process is often taking up over 100% CPU until I kill it off and it restarts.