VNC Server

onoriocatenacci

Hi all,

Just recently installed GhostBSD and I'm really happy with it so far. But I'd rather be able to work with it without having to actually sit at the machine it's hosted on. So I thought--VNC!

So I've found a couple of guides on installing a VNC server on FreeBSD.

How To Setup Remote Desktop In FreeBSD
FreeBSD: Configure VNC Server

But I cannot seem to get this working and since they're both on FreeBSD I realize there may be some significant differences. Steps I've taken to try to resolve this:

1.) Can ping the box.
2.) Cannot telnet on port 5900.
3.) Neither of these posts mentions having to open port 5900 on the firewall but I think the port has to be opened on the firewall so I'm pretty sure port 5900 is open. I mean I added a rule via ipfw. But if there's an easy way to confirm that the port is open, please let me know.
4.) I've tried connecting from both Remmina (I'm using Ubuntu as my primary workday OS) and Tiger. No luck on either. I mention this because I know Remmina can be a bit finicky about connecting. I have logs of what Remmina does but they aren't giving me any clue. When it fails, it gives me the message 'Failed to connect to RDP server "192.168.5.201"' The last three messages in the log are:

(DEBUG) - (remmina_file_save) - Connection profile states saved
(DEBUG) - (remmina_network_monitor_status) - G_NETWORK_CONNECTIVITY_FULL
(DEBUG) - (rco_on_disconnect) - Could not disconnect

That last "Could not disconnect" seems to be fairly generic.

5.) I've tried both RDP and VNC from Remmina. No luck either way. Just as another way of comparing I tried RDP from a Win 11 box I've got (wow, I have a lot of hardware around this place! ) and no luck there either. But as I'm sure you're saying to all of yourselves now, I think the problem is on the VNC server side--not the VNC viewer.

I'm not sure how to log messages from TigerVNC Viewer. I tried it because when I connect to a Raspberry Pi I've got TigerVNC will work where Remmina will not.

Sorry to blather on. Can anyone suggest steps to debug this? The fact that I can't telnet on 5900 seems to say (maybe?) firewall.

Any suggestions--even just "RTFM" (as long as you point me to the manual I should be reading) would be most welcome.

brianthehughes

I use XRDP with great success. As an alternative to VNC.

And it’s sometimes a good option to firewall type to OPEN while testing. 🙂

onoriocatenacci

brianthehughes

FWIW, the firewall was the issue. I post this here for others who may find this thread when they're looking for answers on this. Two things:

1.) I had looked up the wrong port number. 5900 is VNC but 3389 is RDP.

2.) I thought I'd changed my ipfw to open 5900 (which wouldn't have worked anyway) but I hadn't. The rules are now fixed to open 3389 for both TCP and UDP (per this Stack Overflow answer: https://serverfault.com/a/12006)

Regardless thanks for the assistance!