A slightly general VNC question

[Stephen Menard]

CHANGE THE PORT from 5900 to something else
Apple uses 5900 for remote screen control that is NOT compatible with VNC


Robin Hill wrote:
> On Wed Aug 27, 2008 at 03:34:15PM -0700, Shikhanshu Agarwal wrote:
>
>   
>> hello,
>>
>> situation:
>> i am a mac os x (leopard) user. at my home, i have a single ip address from
>> the isp distributed amongst me and my roomates through a belkin wireless
>> router.
>>
>> what i want:
>> i want to access/control my mac from my workplace using vnc.
>>
>> what i did:
>> to do what i want to do, i created a vnc server on the mac, and forwarded
>> the server port from my internal ip address to the router's (external) ip
>> address so that i can communicate with the port from outside the home lan
>>
>>     
> Technically the forwarding is done in the other direction (from the
> external IP to the internal).
>
>   
>> what happened:
>> within the lan, everything's rosy, i can access my mac from roomy's PC using
>> a viewer. also, usually i go to http://ip-address:port in the browser and if
>> it i see the RFB 003.008 message, i assume communication is fine.
>> from office, it looks like port forwarding is working fine.
>> http://my-external-ip:forwarded_port works fine and gives me RFB 003.008 in
>> the browser. thus i am assuming the communication is fine and my requests
>> from outside the lan are being properly forwarded to the vnc server port
>> (5900) on my mac.
>>
>>     
> Okay, that all sounds like it's working.
>
>   
>> the problem:
>> vnc viewer from office wont connect! though browser shows the protocol
>> version message, vnc viewer is not able to find the server. ALSO! ping
>> <external_ip> doesnt work but http://external-ip works (takes me to the
>> router setup page obviously).
>>
>> question:
>> why could the ping not be working? if the office network was "blocking" my
>> outgoing requests, wouldn't http://external-ip:port give a failed connection
>> too? why does it give rfb message? i guess if the ping problem is solved,
>> vnc viewer should work.
>> and suppose, there IS some kind of blocking going on, is using a proxy the
>> solution to be able to ping my router? if it is, how can i do that? if not,
>> is there any other way?
>>
>>     
> I'd ignore the ping issue - there's probably another option somewhere in
> the router config to enable responding to pings.
>
> I don't see why VNC wouldn't work though - you're obviously getting
> through to the server okay via the web browser.  Have you tried both
> 'external-ip:port' and 'external-ip::port' (different clients handle
> port addressing in different ways)?  What VNC client (name & version)
> are you using?
>
> Cheers,
>     Robin
>