Vine Server and Leopard

[frogywill]

Do you guys need logs or anything ?

[JonathanOSX]

Thanks, that won't be necessary.

The basic situation with System Servers on 10.5 is that Apple has placed an additional security restriction that prevents the VNC server from communicating with the window server (ie screen buffer) before a login takes place.

If your machine is set to auto-login then the system server will continue to work since a login process will happen. If your machine is set to come up at the login panel then Vine Server will fail -- we are working to have either a workaround or a new version available in the near future.

[gvwjr]

I see that the second vine icon appears on the dock after the first remote client connection. Once the client disconnects, the process shows as "Not responding" in the Activity Monitor. However, it resumes normally on a subsequent connection. The problem occurs when I'm back at my Mac and try to do a restart. The system cannot quit the second "hung" process and prompts me for a force quit. It would be really neat (and kind of Mac-like) if I didn't have to do the whole force-quit thing.

Thanks for a great product!

[JonathanOSX]

Thanks for the heads up on the second process; we're looking into that. Normally quitting the regular GUI should terminate that second process normally.

Your welcome; glad you like it and I expect to have these little Leopard issues resolved very shortly.

[kentompkins]

My problems seem not to be, exactly, what others have posted about.

I use Vine Viewers and Servers on two Imacs so that I can connect from my office to my house and vice-versa. The setups have worked flawlessly until I upgraded my personal Imac to Leopard.

I can still get from my home to my office; I cannot -- and haven't been able to do so since Oct 26th when I installed Leopard -- connect from my office to my home.

Here is what happens: the Viewer connects and send the password instantly. It does this three times and in instant succession. On the final connection it tells me it is connected and the dpi of my home machine; it stays there for about 30 seconds -- it seems to time out -- and then disconnects with an error message. It follows this same process whenever I attempt a connection.

If I try to us another VNC client, I get either a black screen and it hangs eventually erroring or I get a black screen with a tiny bit of my home desktop in the upper right corner -- as if it tried to write the screen but then stopped. When I try to connect from a windows machine with another VNC client, it get a black screen for a second and then it crashes and disappears.

I use the remote whenever I'm in my office to read documents and email on my home machine so it is important for me to have a reliable, stable connection.

My home Imac has Leopard installed; my office machine has Tiger (10.4). Both machines are new, powerful with good net connections.

I hope whatever the problem is with Leopard can be fixed soon. My teaching is affected by not having the link to my home machine.

ken tompkins

[david.frith]

I have discovered that Apples VNC server in Leopard is a real CPU hog and very slow over a low bandwidth link.

So I went back to using OSXvnc 1.61 (I know I should upgrade but it works for me). I use a tunnel through port 22 from TightVNC on a PC about 10 miles from home. My home uplink speed is 256K. Turning on full compression I get very usable performance - far better than Apple's built-in Screen Sharing.

To cope with OSXvnc not starting after a reboot (a present inconvenience) I start OSXvnc from the command line in the SSH session that sets up the tunnel. I use :-

/Applications/Utilities/OSXvnc.app/OSXvnc-server -rfbport 5900 -desktop "Home Mac" -dontdisconnect --restartonuserswitch N -keyboardLoading N -pressModsForKeys N -swapButtons -rendezvous Y -rfbauth /Applications/Utilities/OSXvnc.app/.osxvncauth &

I think OSXvnc (now Vine Server) is super. Keep up the good work.

David

[dk831]

I am also experiencing this problem. The system server no longer runs at boot up.

Is there any information that I should provide in helping the troubleshooting process??

Just out of curiosity what exactly in Leopard has broken the system server functionality??

I hope you have a chance to resolve this really soon, I love Vine Server and it sucks not having it run in Leopard!

Thanks for the great work! What does the paid version of the software provide that is different??

[david.frith]

I think the problem is discussed in this developer note:-

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2005/tn2083.html

Basically before Login, the OSXvnc-server is not allowed to connect to the launch Window Server and gives the error :-

<Warning>: 3891612: (connectAndCheck) Untrusted apps are not allowed to connect to or launch Window Server before login.

This needs a change in the OSXvnc-server code as discussed in the Apple developer note. This is also preventing me running my command line hack stated in my earlier message.

Meanwhile I think that if you set your Mac to automatically log in, you might be able to get over some of these restrictions. (I've yet to try this but unfortunately I can't get onto my Mac at home from work today due to this problem.)

David

[JonathanOSX]

David:

Yes you are correct, this is precisely the problem and thank you very much for the link to that extremely detailed writeup (and there goes my weekend reading it).

Redstone is currently Beta testing a fix that uses the launcd environment to solve this problem on 10.5. It solves the basic problem of no access to the login panel but still suffers from a few other instabilities caused by unrelated Leopard changes.

[frogywill]