What are your thoughts on vnc?

[agent_paul]

webmin is cool, ive already installed it and it allows me to do most of the things without vnc

 

[Dracata]

VNC is faster, uses less bandwidth, *and* is more secure than most of the suggestions here. You're just all using the free/outdated releases..

For a paid suggestion, try VNC Enterprise Edition.

 

[nikebee]

Been using VNC for a number of years with very little issues.

We have a VNC server setup on our servers in London and Haverfordwest... speeds vary - our London server sits on a 100 meg leased line so is quick as heck, HWest ones are on a 2 meg leased line and can lag at times but nothing horrible anyway.

I've actually found VNC (as long as your using up-to-date versions) more secure than Remote Desktop... turning off RD and blocking that port stopped a whole host of vulnerability issues with one of our servers.

 

[agent_paul]

ok, ive had a quick look at realvnc enterprise and it costs about £35 for a single license. which isnt tooo bad but being me (and credit crunch n all) id rather not spend any monies

i've been using ssh with x forwarding and tunneling these last few days and they seem fine.

nikebee / dracata, have you guys actually used the alternatives to real vnc? people ive spoken to people at work and tell me to go for RDP but i have a feeling that they are only saying it without any proper reasons

 

[Dracata]

ok, ive had a quick look at realvnc enterprise and it costs about £35 for a single license. which isnt tooo bad but being me (and credit crunch n all) id rather not spend any monies

i've been using ssh with x forwarding and tunneling these last few days and they seem fine.

nikebee / dracata, have you guys actually used the alternatives to real vnc? people ive spoken to people at work and tell me to go for RDP but i have a feeling that they are only saying it without any proper reasons

I work for RealVNC, so although biased, it's for a good reason. I recently put together a few internal documents, competitor analysis etc, we test with most popular products internally.

 

[mrbios]

I wouldnt want to be trying to surf over VNC on a LAN - its very slow

No it's not

I use it at work practically every single day, we RDP to servers but all our XP workstations have VNC on them, the only difference you ever notice is when a video is playing on the remote pc, it's certainly not slow by any means

 

[agent_paul]

No it's not

I use it at work practically every single day, we RDP to servers but all our XP workstations have VNC on them, the only difference you ever notice is when a video is playing on the remote pc, it's certainly not slow by any means

I guess this is largely to do with bandwidth and seeing as it can vary, speeds will differ.

if i were to use vnc while someone on the network was hogging the bandwidth i guess it would be totally unusable.

 

[mrbios]

I guess this is largely to do with bandwidth and seeing as it can vary, speeds will differ.

if i were to use vnc while someone on the network was hogging the bandwidth i guess it would be totally unusable.

I'd be fairly worried if a single person could hog all the bandwidth

I guess I've never bothered to monitor the amount of bandwidth it needs, it'd be interesting to find out, there's only one thing on our network that makes speeds crawl and that's the ultrium backup that runs over night

 

[agent_paul]

I'd be fairly worried if a single person could hog all the bandwidth

I guess I've never bothered to monitor the amount of bandwidth it needs, it'd be interesting to find out, there's only one thing on our network that makes speeds crawl and that's the ultrium backup that runs over night

ah, well i only have an up to 8 meg line, a brother that loves to dl, game and stream content. so if i did vnc through the internet, there would be times when vnc'ing would look like its done on a 56k modem

 

[Prophet]

Most of the bandwidth issues I've had with VNC has been because the background on the remote PC/Server hadn't been dissabled via the VNC Server software.

No problems with VNC unless it's a really poor connection, which goes without saying.

 

[Sp00n]

We use vnc as a backup, RDP as a first point of call and teamviewer for clients who don't have vnc installed on their machine (or who can't find their ip).

 

[agent_paul]

thanks for the advice guys! i think ill purchase the enterprise version of realVNC but once installed ill configure it such that ill have to manually startup the service.

i though id do this for security reasons. just incase someone does find out i have vnc running on x port, the service wont always be running for them to log in.

 

[Skidilliplop]

I Like VNC, it's reliable, cross platform and just feels nice to use. The only issue is it's not massive on security, but for public stuff or across an unsecured LAN you can always tunnel it over SSH. Depends what you're doing. Most server type tasks can be done plain SSH because everything linux hapens in CLI anyway. Though there are a few times where a GUI speeds the process up.

 

[Sp00n]

I find vnc very slow compared to RDP on the same wan link in all honesty.

 

[Vertigo]

Apologies for my earlier, somewhat confused, comments - missed that this was Linux and assumed Windoze.

As for RDP, the thing is that this protocol is built into the OS at a level few third-party products such as VNC can ever hope to be and as a result is far more efficient.

 

[Skidilliplop]

I find vnc very slow compared to RDP on the same wan link in all honesty.

True it isn't as fast as RDP for the reason above, but it makes up for it with additional features like chat and file transfer. You can speed up VNC by dropping the quality to suit the link speed. But in this day and age it's never really *that* slow as even household ADSL can manage 400kbit in both directions.
We've come a long way from the days of 64k leased lines and remote support modems plugged into serial ports. Now that was slow. Uploading a printer driver to an NT4 server left time for lunch in between.

 

[BoomAM]

I wouldnt want to be trying to surf over VNC on a LAN, let alone a WAN - its very slow

Your doing it wrong then.

We use it on our network for most of our remote admin tasks.
Works like a charm! A few bugs here and there, but still, pretty good for the grandprice of nack all.

Works well with LANView as well. .

Server stuff is exclusivly RDP or ILO though.

 

[bigredshark]

I've actually found VNC (as long as your using up-to-date versions) more secure than Remote Desktop... turning off RD and blocking that port stopped a whole host of vulnerability issues with one of our servers.

To be honest you'd have to be criminally insane to leave either open to the world without at the very least locking it down to specific incoming IPs on your firewall or more sanely connecting over a VPN first.

...and changing the port for VNC is a fairly pointless exercise, a 6 year old could use a port scanner these days. Security by obscurity was a shoddy idea five years ago and remains a shoddy idea today.

 

[Skidilliplop]

To be honest you'd have to be criminally insane to leave either open to the world without at the very least locking it down to specific incoming IPs on your firewall or more sanely connecting over a VPN first.

...and changing the port for VNC is a fairly pointless exercise, a 6 year old could use a port scanner these days. Security by obscurity was a shoddy idea five years ago and remains a shoddy idea today.

As said, IP restrictions for LAN, Tunneled over SSH for WAN. Simple but effective.

 

[bigredshark]

As said, IP restrictions for LAN, Tunneled over SSH for WAN. Simple but effective.

Indeed it is but you'd be amazed the number of apparent IT professionals who think having RDP available, unrestricted, to the internet is just fine...