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VNC, No Longer Orphaned
geogeek6_7 writes "Icronic informs us of a couple new developments to everyone's favorite piece of remote-managment software, VNC. You may remember that the UK Lab responsible for the creation and maintainence of VNC closed. A company called RealVNC has been formed, sporting the original coders from the AT&T lab, and aiming to 'act as the focal point for open source VNC.' Secondly, the new company has released version 3.3.4 of VNC for Windows and Linux. Greater security and a new, speed-enhancing auto-encoding feature are included among many others in the new version."
Seems like they could make a decent living by selling an enhanced, secured version and then have the "last version" free as in beer & speech to help spread the product. Similar to how Aladdin has done with Ghostscript.
For comparison, also check out TightVNC. TightVNC makes a remote graphical desktop quite usable over DSL speeds.
It sounds like the main VNC branch has now added a tight-like encoding (ZRLE) which may obviate the need for TightVNC, but TightVNC has some additional niceties like automatic tunneling over SSH.
We were looking to do demos for our software (web based) and wanted to be able to do something like webex (I'd link but their website is down! guess I'm glad I didn't pick them!).
For 1 demo using their system to 15 clients it was going to run between $800-$1200 for 1 to 1.5 hours. I told my boss we could test a solution for free on my box (dual boot Linux/win2000) and if it worked it would be $1200 one time. I demoed to our higher ups and we have a salesman that is using it 2-3 times a day and since our corporate office has conference phone systems already they are free (already a paid service, so why pay twice?).
In the end we spend $800 on the hardware $320 on VMWare $0 on VNC/xfrbserver (spelling?) to export to multiple hosts, and we have an MSDN subscription so I run Win98 in VMWare so the person demoing feels at home (even though it would have worked in Linux w/Netscape the sales people and clients are more comfortable in Windows).
At first they found it a little confusing. But now it's all the rave and I just bring it up remotely (or from the office) and keep an eye on it to make sure they dont accidentally close the exporting server (xf0bserver?), you'd be surprised how many times they kill their own demo!!!! lol...
Anyway since it was so successful I'm implementing a solution to automate offsite backups using sftp/ssh and encrypting our backups daily.
I hope for their sake they never make the mistake of firing me b/c noone else could even tell you what ls does!!! lol.... ensuring job security by doing a good job, saving money, and implementing solutions they dont understand.
When you run Remote Desktop Connection the user is locked out of their screen, you can only export to one computer, and it's security is not what I would call "trustworthy".
VNC kicks the hell out of RDC in WinXP (and I use both at work).
Now I have newer version of the remote app that our firewall administrator won't let through.
AskSlashdot (always a good idea at 12:30am):
Is VNC secure enough to run on a couple of high-traffic, high-exposure web servers? Man, would I ever catch hell if I talked the firewall admin into setting the VNC port open, then we get hacked through it. My company tends to trust commercial solutions like the really flakey Altiris CarbonCopy (formerly Compaq CarbonCopy). Any experience with security bugs?
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I've tried out VNC before, but I thought it was slower than Windows Terminal Services client/RDP. Now that I've been using Linux I like using X11 over SSH while I'm at work/school. Has the new version made VNC faster? I have one last Windows box that would be nice to administer remotely.
(The fastest, to me, was RDP)
Vote for global prefs bug
VNC is widely used in our company. It is a great alternative to a dual boot or or devoted Linux machine. Some people just arent up to speed with using the Linux operating system as their main environment. They use VNC on Windows to most of their development and use Windows for everyday applications such as Visio, Office, IE, Outlook,etc. (Ironically, all MS products..)
Its also a huge benefit for the sys admin so he doesnt have to waste time configuring each PC to meet the exact testing standards. We can just run a VNC client on Windows and have a Linux environment. No extra installment or configuration time.
VNC is a vital cost and time saver in our company.
100% Insightful
The site is in fact Icrontic. They just registered the Icronic name since its commonly misspelled. :)
:/
Hopefully their new server will survive the slashdot effect part III.
By rootless he means connecting to a remote 'window" rather than a display (i.e., so you can run a session which just displays a remote Word document, rather than the entire desktop).
:-) is a full screen mode, where it hides your local windows/menubar and displays the remote desktop full screen (as if you had a monitor switch rigged up).
This crops up periodically on the vnc list, but it doesn't look like there's an easy way to implement it (at least for Windows, and certainly for the Mac where applications tend not to live inside a single window - not to mention the menu bar). There's no support in the current VNC protocol for resizing the remote framebuffer without re-establishing the connection, so just resizing a window would also mean dropping the connection and reconnecting.
What VNCThing has (I'm the author
-dair (note this is a bit buggy in the current release, but an update is on its way)
RDC/RDP isn't a standard: as usual, Microsoft took a bunch of ITU standards and hacked them up to make them incompatible with everything else.
Nor is there much to emulate. Microsoft's RDP isn't even in the same league with X11 in terms of functionality or performance over LANs. For dial-up connections, there are also good X11 protocol compression solutions. VNC outperforms RDP greatly in another area: it's a very simple, well-documented, open protocol that is easy to implement and works pretty much everywhere. There are VNC servers for 8bit machines, even. Furthermore, X11 and VNC clients and servers are available for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX, so you can already talk from any platform to any other platform with the open protocols.
People will be able to interoperate with Microsoft RDP via projects like RDesktop--as long as Microsoft lets them and on those odd days when they ship it (Windows XP Home doesn't come with it). Building anything else on top of RDP is like building on quicksand since the world can shift from under you whenever Ballmer feels like it. If Microsoft wanted you to use RDP for anything else, they would have picked an open standard.