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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.
I love vnc, with a passion. I also love Tightvnc, and all its varients. VNC is the one thing that makes me feel safe when I leave my computer because I know it's a broadband connection away.
Even at work!
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
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.
I'd have to agree that VNC isn't exactly good on dialup connections or even ISDN.
However, this is what tightvnc is for. Regular VNC works very well in a LAN though, and works quite well from every broadband connection I've used.
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?
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"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
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
some tips: generally you are better off NOT enabling ssh compression as VNC's compression works better. Supposedly tightVNC is the best for narrow pipes. But on fat pipes in actually is better not to compress. if you are worried about security do two things. first always turn off the http port (on by default at 580x). Second, for extra security only allow connections to/from loopback 127.0.0.1. Then use ssh to send it where you want. Finally, note that VNC itself is not encoded so the ONLY protection you are getting is the SSH encoding. If you dont tunnel all the way you are exposed. However since it is graphics info and not plain ascii, it takes a clever hacker to actually decode what you are sending in the clear.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I use the client and server on win2k boxes, and the new version is noticeably faster. I definitely recommend an upgrade for anyone using the older version on windows.
I have been using VNC long before I started using linux. As soon as I started the Linux environment, I used VNC for remote access.
Question: Is there a way to use VNC (or other) to access the main X session (I guess tty0 in rh 7.3) and share it similar to how it is shared in windows?
While I speak of remote access, maybe someone can tell me why when I am @ an ssh shell, my path etc is never set.
Everyone has mentioned tightvnc, so I dont think thats needed but I will say that I found it really interesting when Farmers Insurance rolled out all the Dells to agents across the country, VNC was installed and running on every box.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
If you use VNC, they are accepting donations at http://www.realvnc.com/contribute.html.
I had a similar experience with VNC. It was more a matter of showing that OSS software was somehow 'worthy' though. First on the scene at work was VNC when I mentioned it to our former net admin and he started using it. Then I wrote a webapp using OSS tools (and made sure my manager, the net admin, God and everyone else knew it), and it was a highly visible and smooth rollout. Finally, all the recent MS security issues finally made our net admin cave and he decided last week to replace our MS proxy, with IIS next on the block. Now it cascades from there, since the app I wrote is on a server by itself and is going to be switched to Linux as well. And I'm also finally in a position to use Linux as my desktop OS.
To the VNC devs who helped kick it all off for me, thank you!
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
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.
VNC is already split into the original distribution from ORL (now RealVNC, TightVNC from Constantin & friends, eSVNC, which added security and file transfers (though win only) and a bunch of Pocket PC, Palm, MacOS, OS X etc. forks.
VNC is such a wonderful und useful program and I sometimes dream of how much better, securer and faster it could be.
Plaese combine your efforts. The world will thank you.
bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel