Mac – VNC connection from Windows to Mac drops immediately

macremote desktopsshvnc

This tutorial describes in detail how to setup a remote desktop from Windows to a Mac using putty tools and VNC.

However, my connection is immediately dropped after authentication. (i.e. tunneling and login works, but somehow the VNC session cannot be properly established or displayed). Following other hints I suspect graphics issues but haven't been able to resolve it so far.

Has anyone had this issue?

Or do you know a VNC Viewer that writes helpful log files?

Best Answer

I had a similar issue with a MAC -> PC connection (but without the PuTTY tools)

What I discovered is that the 'Server Type' needs to be implicitly set to the target system or set to 'Other' - Leaving it as 'Automatic' failed to work when connecting between disparate systems.

I can now connect from my iPhone -> PC or MacBook -> PC (and visa-versa) without issue.

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Windows – Fast VNC from Windows to Mac

OS X Leopard with its own ScreenSharing client, connecting to another OS X native screen sharing server, does some negotiation on colour depth, etc., so it's transferring less data.

(You can see this effect exaggerated if you connect to an OS X system from Windows using the RealVNC client over a higher latency connection. It will take a long time to build up the screen output.)

I couldn't find a way to make RealVNC request a lower colour depth so what I did, to work around this, was run a copy of VineServer on OS X with the '-maxdepth 8' option (and '-rfbport 5901' to run it as an alternate server), and connect to that when I connect long distance (which I always do through an SSH tunnel, before anyone states the obvious.)

VNC Tunnel – How to Set Up via SSH Connection

You should be able to do the same thing as described here. In your case you would use putty to connect to server1 through ssh but use the IP address or name of Server2 in the destination field instead of 'localhost'.

All the following steps are to be done on your windows system:

Open the main Putty screen:

Host Name: [your public IP or domain name for server1]
Port: [Use whatever port Server1 is configured to use]

Under the [SSH -> Tunnels] menu in putty:

Source port: 5000
Destination: [server2 internal IP address]:5900
Click Add
Click Open and type in the username and password

Open your VNC client. Different VNC clients might use different notations for specifying ports. If you use ultraVNC:

VNC Server: localhost:5000

Server2 needs to have a VNC server on it but it only needs to be visible to Server1 on the internal network.

Best Answer

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