Using VNC without authentication

[hjvm@freenet.de]

Hello Todd and William Hooper!

Thank you for your answers. To make things clear: I'm talking about Linux 
client and server. No Windows in there! What I want is not to be prompted for 
a password at all. I'm very lazy :-) and I don't even want to hit return when I'm 
running the viewer. (So that's not really the point. I'm playing with the idea to 
write a very basic a little bit modified vncviewer for my own purpose and I don't 
want to complicate this by an - in my case unnecessary - authentication. OK, 
it wouldn't be very complicate but I think it should be possible in some way to 
access vnc without authentication if this is required.)

Todd:
I tried to comment out the password and auth-part in vncserver. It's true that 
vncserver starts up even when the passwd file has a size of 0 Bytes and is 
completely empty. But: I'm still prompted for a password. When I simply hit 
return I get an authentication failed error. Would you mind sending me your 
vncserver file?

William Hooper:
OK, I've looked at the documentation. I looked at the documentation before, 
too, but obviously not carefully enough. But: the -rfbauth option indicates the 
passwd file. How can this help me having no password at all. I tried the 
following: 
vncserver -rfbauth passwd
with an empty passwd file an the original vncserver file. This should be the 
same as 
xvnc -rfbauth passwd
because options vncserver doesn't know are passed to xvnc. When starting 
the vncviewer I was still prompted for a password. But simply hitting return 
didn't give me access. What would you suggest?
I generally agree with you about security. But in my case (4 computers 
without internet connection, in my flat which nobody can access, no valuable 
data on it) the access security is not my first and last thought of the day.

Any advice from you or others would be welcome.
Regards, Hans

On 22 Sep 2003 at 16:02, William Hooper wrote:

> hjvm@freenet.de said:
> > Hello!
> >
> > When I look at the RFB-protocol it seems to be possible to run VNC without
> > authentication, i. e. without having to provide a password.
> 
> Please read the documentation, paying attention to the "AuthRequired"
> section.
> http://www.realvnc.com/winvnc.html#11
> 
> > Is this
> > possible with
> > Linux, too?
> 
> Please read the documentation, paying attention to the "-rfbauth" section.
> http://www.realvnc.com/man/Xvnc.html
> 
> > (Security doesn't matter at all!)
> 
> Security always matters.
> 
> -- 
> William Hooper
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