Vine Viewer 3.0 Fails to Honour Server Sharing Settings

Vine
#1

It looks like there is a bug in Vine Viewer. It appears that Vine Viewer does not honour the “Server Sharing” settings in Vine Server.

How to Reproduce:

  1. In the Sharing tab of the Preferences of Vine Server 3.0, set “Allow only one VNC connection at a time” BUT UNCHECK “Keep existing viewer if a new viewer tries to connect”.

  2. Start up Your Vine Server.

  3. Run Vine Viewer 3.0 and connect to your Vine Server (ie connect to localhost).

  4. Run another VNC Viewer (eg Chicken of the Sea, Tight VNCViewer etc) and try to connect to your Vine Server.

The other viewers cannot connect. Vine Viewer hogs the VNC connection and does not let go.

  1. Now do the opposite as follows:

a) Disconnect all viewers from your VNC viewer.
b) Connect to your Vine Server using your second viewer (e.g. Chicken of the Sea etc).
c) Now try to connect using Vine Viewer 3.0.

You can!! Vine Viewer does connect and other viewer dies as expected.

It looks like the problem is with Vine Viewer 3.0 and NOT Vine Server.

It appears that Vine Viewer does NOT honour the “Keep existing viewer if a new viewer tries to connect” setting in Vine Server.

I hope you can fix this small bug.

#2

This is actually a “feature” in that the Viewer tries to reconnect when a connection drops. Unfortunately the VNC protocol doesn’t provide a notice to distinguish between server initiated disconnects and just random network drops.

If you want to disable it though you can issue the following command from a Terminal in your user account.

defaults write com.redstonesoftware.VineViewer ReconnectAttempts 0
#3

Great thanks for the fix.

If you want to restore this setting what number do I use for reconnect attempts?

eg

defaults write com.redstonesoftware.VineViewer ReconnectAttempts 3 ??

#4

Jonathan I tried:

defaults write com.redstonesoftware.VineViewer ReconnectAttempts 0

And it did not make any difference. I never had a com.redstonesoftware.VineViewer preference before. But I did have a com.redstonesoftware.Vine preference.

So I tried:
defaults write com.redstonesoftware.Vine ReconnectAttempts 0

Still no luck. Vine Viewer will never let go of the connection when Vine Server is set for:

a) Allow only one VNC connection at a time
b) BUT NOT for “Keep existing viewer if a new viewer tries to connect”

Maybe it is not possible to turn off this feature in Vine Viewer to always try to reconnect.