keep alive?

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, John Serink wrote:

> Make sure polling is eanabled on vnc. This should keep repaints 
> happening as the desktop clock increments.

I don't know if that is supposed to be enabled by Xvnc (vncserver) or by 
the client.  There is nothing about "polling" or "poll" in the man pages 
for Xvnc or vncserver, but I'm using Xvnc 4.0b4 because Red Hat Enterprise 
gives us that old version and I don't have root permissions on this box. 
But a newer man page an a different machine also shows nothing.  I also 
see nothing about "poll" or related concepts in the vncviewer man page, 
neither for the old version nor for a newer one.

Anyway, just by sheer luck, I figured out something that works for me:  I 
open Emacs and the blinking cursor (I assume) keeps the vncviewer alive. 
The polling idea sounds better but I don't know how to implement it. 
Maybe it is a Windows-only option.

I just realized that I wasn't clear enough in my earlier message (below) 
because the problem was not that the session was failing -- it is always 
available on the server -- it was that the vncviewer connection to the 
server was getting killed.  A blinking cursor seems to be enough to solve 
this problem.  Unfortunately, I usually don't like to use a blinking 
cursor, but it isn't a big deal and in this case it helps more than it 
hurts.

Mike


> ----- Original Message -----
> From: vnc-list-admin "at" realvnc.com <vnc-list-admin "at" realvnc.com>
> To: VNC List <vnc-list "at" realvnc.com>
> Sent: Tue Dec 16 13:14:28 2008
> Subject: keep alive?
>
> What is the trick to keeping a VNC session alive?  With SSH we have
> schemes for sending packets intermittently to keep inactive sessions from
> being killed by routers.  Maybe such a thing exists for RealVNC.  I'm
> using this:
>
> The server is Xvnc version 4.0b4
> The viewer is VNC Viewer Free Edition 4.1.1 for X
>
> Best,
> Mike