Remote admin using VNC.

[Luis B. Almeida]

Geoffrey Taylor wrote:
> 
> Hi there VNC people,
> I am a sysadmin for a network of about 100 PCs and
> unix workstations. We often need to
> remotely administer Win95, Win98 and WinNT PCs.
> The VNC view system looks like it might be very
> useful in this respect and I have been testing
> it out on two PCs. Some questions have come
> to mind whilst doing this -I don't think I can
> see answers to these in the docs or FAQ.
> 
> 1)
> On PCs which are going to be administered, we would
> like to use the VNC server software on its own, so
> that PC users could not run the VNC viewer program
> at all. Is there an installation procedure which
> only installs the server software, not the VNC viewer?
> Better still, is there a way to disable the VNC viewer
> whether it is installed or not?

I think that what you can do is simply to delete the 'vncviewer.exe'
file after the installation. I don't see any way of preventing its use
if people bring the program in a floppy, for example. I'm used to Win
95, and Win 98 should be similar. I don't know whether there is anything
else you can do on Win NT.
 
> 2)
> We would install the server program as a service. We
> would like to have something to notify the user of the
> PC when a VNC viewer has successfully connected to the
> VNC server -something to flash on the service tray
> perhaps? This has two purposes, firstly, it will placate
> those (a little) who fear covert operations by their
> systems administrators, and secondly (given the setup
> in the previous point is possible) it will mean we will
> be aware of any unauthorised use of the viewer.

I'm not completely sure about this one, but I think there's no
possibility of doing what you want in the current version of WinVNC,
given that you run it as a service. If it is run as a user program, it
will display an icon in the system tray area, and this icon will change
color when a connection is active.
 
> 3)
> On the test PC I have been using (Win95) with VNC
> server installed as a service, nothing appears in the
> service tray at all. From my reading of the documentation,
> this doesn't seem to be correct behaviour -or perhaps I
> missed something. Should something appear in the service
> tray on a Win95 system when VNC server is installed as
> a service?

I think this actually is the correct behavior, although I'm not too sure
of what is in the docs. But I'm sure that I've always observed the
behavior you describe: if WinVNC is run as a service, no icon is shown
in the system tray area.

By the way, if there were an option whether to display the icon or not,
this would solve your second problem. I think I've seen other people in
this list mention that need too. Wez, could this be put in the wish list
for the next revision?

Regards,

Luis
-- 
Luis B. Almeida
                                  Phone:  +351-1-3100246,+351-1-3544607
INESC                             Fax:    +351-1-3145843
R. Alves Redol, 9                 E-mail: luis.almeida "at" inesc.pt       
1000 Lisboa, Portugal             http://ilusion.inesc.pt/~lba/ 
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