I am trying to set things up as simply as possible so that I can remotely control my friend’s computer when she needs help. We are both using Mac OS X Tiger.
I have a script (which I have not yet sent her, so she had to try things manually) that will run VineServer in reverse connection mode, attempting to connect to my computer which has a fixed IP address.
I can run Chicken of the VNC in listening mode, and if I open my port forwarding on port 5500, her desktop does appear.
We got stuck there. From various other posts I see that in fact port 5900 needs to be opened as well, which I hadn’t realised.
Is that needed on both computers, on mine only, or on hers only? I am curently not sure what kind of a broadband setup she has.
If she has to go to the router configuration, open port 5900, and then close it again when we have finished, it will be much too complicated for her.
Port 5500 needs to be opened on the Viewer’s machine/network for reverse connections to work.
Port 5900 needs to be opened on the Server’s machine for regular connections to work.
If you got her screen then you were connected and no additional port configuration needs to happen. If you were unable to control her keyboard/mouse then you should check the server settings and also make sure that it she has not Fast User Switched since launching Vine Server (10.3),
Thanks. Her VineServer settings should have been ok, as I could certainly move the mouse on her screen. I didn’t seem to be able to do anything else. clicking on the Spotlight icon did not reveal its window, and when she ran Spotlight I could not see anything appear.
I can’t recall, though, if she had done a Fast User Switch. I don’t think so, and I am sure there was nothing of the kind between the time when I could mover her mouse and the time when none of her actions appeared on my screen and I couldn’t change anything on hers.
Good to know that no further port connections are needed. had assumed that port 5900 also needed to be opened after reading one of the threads about reverse connection and the answer below
A1: Most VNC servers that offer reverse connection configurations default to port 5500 for the invite. Once a connection is established, it stays on port 5900, there is no port swapping dynamically.
I gather from your response that this is not so.
I might make a few more tries talking things through over the phone before I actually visit in about a month, when I can check all the settings.
I am sure I can get it working in the end, the initial setup can be tricky as when something goes wrong there isn’t physical access by me to both computers to check things.