Episode: 1606
Title: HPR1606: Howto VNC
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1606/hpr1606.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:43:54

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its Monday 29th on September 2014. This in HBR episode 1666 entitled How To VNC. It is
hosted by Klaatu and is about 15 minutes long. Feedback can be sent to Klaatu at HakaPublicRadio.org
or not leaving a comment on this episode. The summary is Klaatu talks about how to get to
VNC up and running. This episode of HBR is brought to you by an
Honesthost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15. Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
How to win this is Hacker Public Radio. My name is Klaatu and in this episode I want to talk about
VNC. VNC is a protocol that allows a user to log into a computer remotely and
securely. Oh, and graphically, all those three things remotely, securely and graphically.
It's available pretty much on any operating system. If you're a Linux user, you're probably
thinking, well, I don't need to VNC because I have SSH. In a way, you're right. You could
create an SSH tunnel and use X11 forwarding through that tunnel and you'd have a similar effect.
SSH is just an application. It's not a protocol layer. Many applications leverage SSH like
R-Sync and get lots of others, but ultimately you're just running an application remotely.
With VNC, you're logging into the remote computer such that the entire session is delivered to you.
Everything about that environment is delivered to you. You see the screen of the remote machine
exactly as you left it or exactly as the user is seeing it if you're doing a support call.
It's screen sharing, but the nice thing about it is that it's cross-platform and it's supposed
to be secure and all that other good stuff. On Linux and BSD, X11 is the default graphical remote
login method. A few people actually use it for that, and in fact, honestly, I didn't know it
could do that until DeepGeek was talking about something about how he used XDM to do just that.
It's not fully encrypted either. I mean, as is, it's not encrypted, so VNC is the de facto
default, secure screen sharing protocol. On Macs, a built-in method was implemented through,
I believe, iChat, and then it was rebranded, I think, as back to my Mac. I believe so.
And then there was, like, the Apple remote desktop application, which you had to purchase separately.
And it's an Apple product, so it probably is already dead by now, and it's certainly proprietary.
So there have been things out there, but now currently, I shouldn't say currently,
I should say the last time I checked, which was fairly recently, it's just VNC. They just
brought in VNC, what a concept, and it's built in through the screen sharing option in the system
preferences, in the sharing system preferences. Then on Windows, RDC, from what I understand is the
default method. I don't know if that's an open standard. I do know that it's been, or maybe it's
been reverse engineered. I don't know. Other things can do that. The RDP thing, I guess. But again,
I'm not sure if it's encrypted or not. I really don't know. And certainly, there's no harm in
using VNC as the alternative, because VNC does run on Windows as well. So pretty much no matter
what computer you're on, what platform you're on, you can use VNC. And that makes it really handy
for both your personal use, but also, I think, importantly, at least for me, and I'm imagining
probably a lot of you guys for support calls. You know, someone calls up, a friend, a family,
whatever, tells you how horrible things are going on their computer, begs for your help,
and they kind of describe some things, and suddenly you get completely fed up.
Start a VNC server. It's so much easier. So let's go through how exactly to do that. Obviously,
being a Linux user, I really only know how to do this on Linux, to be honest. But I imagine it's
I'm assuming that there are some very easy setup things on other platforms as well. So
I'm going to describe the process, and you can probably translate in a pinch.
So the first thing you need to do is to start up the VNC server on the target computer. That makes
sense, right? It's just like any other server. If a web server, if Apache isn't running on the
web server, then it's not really a web server, right? Well, I mean, engine accident, all that
other stuff. But you know what I'm saying. So to start up the VNC server, you have to get a VNC
server software onto your Linux box. There are a couple out there. The easiest one that I have found,
sort of the most, you know, just kind of the the the one that just kind of works is X1, 1, VNC.
If that's not installed on your system, install it with your package manager, whatever that may be.
And I will just briefly mention that yes, there are others. I think KDE has their own little
graphical VNC front end, which I've actually used, and it's worked fine.
Some I can know him has one that last time I tried it, it actually did not work, but
but it probably does now. But X11 VNC just it's just really small, really simple, you know, it works.
I like it. Plus what what I also like about it is that I can easily SSH into the target
computer if I need to and set up X11 VNC for myself. And then when they call for help, I can say,
okay, you know, turn your router on and do the you know, do the port opening thing that I thought
you had to do, or maybe I've already been with them in their router at one point, and I have already
opened a non-standard SSH port for myself. And then I just SSH in, I turn on their VNC, and then I
can see their screen. It works. It's kind of nice. So, after you install X11 VNC, you have to create a
password file so that not just anyone can VNC into your target computer or target computer.
So the way that I did that was I just make a directory in their home directory
till the slash dot VNC, and then I just echo some password, passphrase, into till the slash dot
VNC slash auth, a-u-t-h. I'm pretty sure that I just called it that. You can call it I think
anything you want, but whatever. So, and then you can start the server. And the way that you
start it needs to have that password file referenced. So you do X11 VNC space dash password file. That's
P-A-S-W-D file, space till the slash dot VNC slash auth, space dash forever. So now the computer's
listening on port 5900 for an authenticated request to connect VNC. And then on the other
computer, so on your own computer, you just get a VNC client. Now, because I am frequently on KDE,
I honestly very frequently use KRDC. That's the built-in client to view VNC. Now, they also have
a KDE application that you can launch and invite someone to sign on. So, technically speaking,
you don't need to do all that with X11 VNC if both parties are running KDE. I just, I don't,
I don't know, somehow I don't do the KDE thing. I just use the K, the X11 VNC.
I'm sure there's a reason I just don't remember why. But anyway, you can use KRDC for your client
to look at their screen. You can also just download like Tiger VNC. That's another good one. And
I think there are a couple of other ones. Now, I think Tiger is cross-platform or at least somewhat
cross-platform. It's cross-platform enough for me at one point. So that's sometimes kind of
nice to be using the same thing that your target is using. I say the word target and it makes it sound
so, you know, evil and militaristic. I don't really mean it that way. I just mean the person
you're helping, your support caller or your whatever client. They all work basically the same way.
It doesn't really matter which one you use. The idea is that you start up your VNC client, you type
in the username and the IP address for the computer that you want to connect to. And then a new
window opens in your little viewer and you see the person's desktop on it and you're done. And
a lot of times they'll have different settings for the quality of the image, you know, and the
frame rate and stuff like that. And you can kind of, you can experiment and see what you need to do
in order to make that work best for you guys. But it works pretty darn well. It definitely works
in a pinch when they're describing something on screen and you just have no idea what they're trying
to say. And you just know that if you could just be right there in front of their computer,
you could just fix it in 10 minutes and it would be over with. And so just VNC. Now if you're having
trouble connecting, you probably know this but it's something that a lot of people do tend to forget.
It's probably a firewall issue. Presumably, you've got a router between you and your target.
So if you log into the router's admin interface wherever that might be and then you go to like some,
unfortunately, it's never the same. But you have to find the place where you can forward ports.
So you forward the port 5900, which is again the standard VNC port forward that to the machine that
you want to log into, then when you're coming to add them from outside their firewall,
your computer knocks on port 5900 and then it goes on through with the correct authentication
right to that computer. Now unfortunately, that can be difficult if you haven't had time to set
all this stuff up yourself because then not only are you trying to instruct the person asking
you for help on, hey, this is how you connect to, this is how you start up VNC. Now you also have to back up
and tell them, oh yeah, and now I need you to log into your router. And that creates a whole other
issue. So that's very often almost like the deal breaker. So that's a little bit tough. Luckily,
for me, I have been able to, you know, everyone that knows me well enough to just be able to
call me up and say, hey, I don't know how to use, you know, such and such. Won't you help me?
Everyone in that scenario, I will have actually probably set up their network in the first place
and I would have left myself, I guess the back door, but you know, a port in for support calls.
So yeah, that's VNC. As you can see, it is very simple to use. It's quite convenient.
It is cross-platform, so it just kind of makes it like a really good tool to have in your
tool kit. So make sure that you've got that on your computer and make sure you put it on everyone's
computer that you know so that they can let you in if need be. Hopefully that helps.
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