What are your thoughts on vnc?

...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.

Good point, but not strictly true. Due to the widespread use of VNC and the generally well known default of TCP 5900, most automatic scanners will look for the 5900-5999 range only. Changing to a seperate non-standard port will remove this initial potential security threat.

For the most secure connection, as you've stated the best bet is to:

* Enable native-platform authentication.
* Restrict access to a specific subnet/IP range/address.
* Changing port to something non-standard.
* Ensure encryption is forced.
 
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.

Again, you guys are referring to VNC as a singular. There are many different VNC releases. All free VNC releases are based off of our original VNC Free Edition Codebase.

Commercial VNC software, is however, in a different league.
 
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.

This really isn't required, due to the number of security features built into VNC EE;

* Blacklisting feature.
* Private key generation to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.
* Industry standard encryption.
* Platform-native authentication.
 
Again, you guys are referring to VNC as a singular. There are many different VNC releases. All free VNC releases are based off of our original VNC Free Edition Codebase.

Commercial VNC software, is however, in a different league.
So how would you compare yourselves to say Teamviewer or webex and the like?
 
So how would you compare yourselves to say Teamviewer or webex and the like?

In what sense are we talking mate? Performance, Features, Cross-platform interoperability, Security, Price, Resource-Usage, Footprint, Scalability, Deployment?

There is no one "best" remote control application, it entirely depends on what you'll be using it for, and what you're looking for specifically.
 
To be honest i have always found VNC to be slow.

I use dameware my self.


Has VNC moved away from storing passwords in plain text?
 
To be honest i have always found VNC to be slow.

I use dameware my self.


Has VNC moved away from storing passwords in plain text?

Again, depends which actual product you're talking about.

VNC Enterprise Edition is integrated with AD and stores no details locally, it allows authentication via local/domain credentials.

That said, no previous versions of VNC stored passwords in plain text, they were obfuscated and stored in the registry (requiring admin access to access). This isn't the most secure method, though is miles better than storing in plain text.
 
We use dameware NT utilities which includes dameware mini RDP... which is great... it pushes out to client machines so no setup required... not that quick at screen refresh but it works a treat.
 
So educate me... why would anybody bother to use VNC when RDP is already there? (and i'm talking about windows, not hetergenous systems/linux etc.)
 
So educate me... why would anybody bother to use VNC when RDP is already there? (and i'm talking about windows, not hetergenous systems/linux etc.)

VNC is great for helping end users as they can also view the screen and can talk you through their issues and watch how you fix it whereas RDP will lock them out of their session.

RDP Breaks.
a lot.

Can't say i've come across RDP breaking... not if it's set-up properly in the first place (not that there's exactly much to it!).
 
We have VNC on all client machines and servers at our place, but we generally use RDP for the servers as it's a bit quicker, and we can also track who's messing about with servers like me :P
 
I use RDP when i want to do something quick and simple.

When i need more flexibility, i use RealVNC (e.g. when i want to view both of my screens on my work PC, easily transfer clipboard data etc).

Although lately VNC has started to randomly disconnect me and time out.. although i'm not sure if that's an issue with my connection or VNC :S
 
When i need more flexibility, i use RealVNC (e.g. when i want to view both of my screens on my work PC, easily transfer clipboard data etc).

RDP does both of those things you've stated there. IMO i'll only ever use RDP to manage windows boxes remotely. No need to install additional software thats quite often vulnerable and needs patching.
 
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