Comments on: Screen Sharing replaces Apple Remote Desktop

By: ppayne

ppayne — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 01:39:50 +0000

Is there any way you very smart people could help me get VNsea on my unlocked iPhone connecting to Leopard’s screen sharing? It seems so easy that no one has made a specific walkthrough but I cannot get it to work. I have screen sharing turned on on my main Mac, with “VNC can connect with password” clicked on and password entered. I try to connect from the iPhone to the IP and port 5900 (is this the default? this is totally confusing to me, I can only see USB and firewire ports on my computer — just kidding about that last part). Anyway, no matter what happens, it cannot connect through port 5901 or anything else I’ve tried port-wise. Can anyone help?

By: adamc00

adamc00 — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:28:14 +0000

I dunno who Geoff is, an invention from my distracted brain I suspect. Sorry about that, I was actually trying to say “Thanks Chris”.

The alias method looks good and having an open shell around can be handy. Open tunnels aren’t an issue however since the connection will be dropped once there are no active channels, this will happen when the VNC session is closed, which is enough of a reminder for me.

By: adamc00

adamc00 — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:51:18 +0000

This post inspired me (thanks Geoff) but I didn’t like the auto cut then manual paste bit so I found a less fiddly way. I use a function instead of an alias to get variable substitution under bash (alias can’t do this). The line below defines a bash function.

stss () { ssh -f -C -L 5901:localhost:5900 $1 ’sleep 5′; open vnc://localhost:5901/ ; }

The -f on ssh forks the ssh and puts it in the background. The ’sleep 5′ gives ssh something to do on the remote host until the VNC session is established otherwise it will just exit immediately tearing down the tunnel and therefore the screen sharing session will fail.

Instead of directly invoking “Screen Sharing.app” directly, “open” invokes it for us since that is what OS X 10.5 (don’t know about earlier versions) has registered as a handler for the vnc protocol.

Once the function is defined, it is invoked the same way as the original, eg …

stss www

… but avoids the hostname dialog box from Screen Sharing.app and jumps directly to the connecting stage.

By: Toucouleur

Toucouleur — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 08:49:56 +0000

thanks a lot for this tip ! I think I will replace my Synergy’s sharing system for this sharing screen connection.