VNC Access Slow

Strongly suggest getting Vine Server (aka OSXvnc). It fully supports the TightVNC protocols as well as reduced color as specified by the client.

Vine Server is free to use
<http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/31192>

I use the Vine Server on my Mom's iMac 300 miles away. I connect over an ssh connection and I tell my VNC client (Chicken of the VNC) that I only want 8 bit color. While not blindly fast, it is very servicable, especailly compared to driving 300 miles to fix a problem at Mom's house 🙂 Mom has a DSL line that has 768kbits up-link speed.

I also use the Vine Server on my Mac at work. Work has a bit faster pipe than Mom, but I still tend to go with a lower color density to improve responsiveness.

One more thing. If your Mac has 2 or more displays, then Vine Server ONLY exports the display with the menu bar.

Another VNC server you might consider is X11VNC. While it started life exporting a Unix or Linux system's X11 desktop, there is a port which will export the Mac OS X desktop via VNC protocols. I've tried it and it does work.

I dont use back to my mac.

I use screen sharing over an SSH tunnel. I am lucky enough to have ADSL2+ at my home/office so I have 2.6 megabit upload speed. Having said that I run a lot of services that use up outgoing bandwidth so I have implemented a QoS rule on my router to prioritise SSH traffic above any other protocols.

so when I ssh into my network from anywhere in the world and launch screen sharing it is not much slower then when I am connected directly to my LAN.

VNC is the common way to manage a remote Mac. However, if you want something else, there are services such as LogMeIn.com, YuuGuu.com, TimBukTu (netopia.com), CoPilot.com

Setting up ssh on your Mac is as easy as turning on "Remote Login" in the Sharing System Preferences. You now have a sshd daemon running.

But that is just the start of your journey. You will need to tell your router to forward port 22 from the internet to port 22 on your Mac. Or if you are smart, some higher numbered port on the internet to port 22 on your Mac. Of course you will have to tell ssh on the remote system to use that high numbered port via the -p option 🙂

And has anyone mentioned setting up an ssh tunnel?

ssh -l username -p 22 -L 5900:127.0.0.1:5900 your.macs.ip.addr
Username:
Password:

The first 5900 says to use your current systems port 5900 as the local end of the tunnel. ssh tunnels allow the use of a gateway system, which is what the 127.0.0.1 address is. But since it is 127.0.0.1 (the magic adddress that means your current system), there is no gateway systems being used. And finally the last 5900 is the port on the remote system you wish to connect to.

And then you need to magic for telling your VNC client to use the ssh tunnel

Address of VNC server: 127.0.0.1
Port: 5900 (or if your VNC client wants a display: 0)

I'm assuming you have figured out how to find your Mac on the internet. But I'll just mention services such as no-ip.com and dyndns.org which can provide a dynamic DNS name that is updated when your ISP changes your DHCP assigned IP address.

Ah great, thank you. Presumably the VNC server built into Mac OS is limited and can only support full colour, hence why the screen takes forever to load and why the quality suddenly kick back to speed things up like my Windows box doe

You can unlock the built in vnc server with a simple command then you have full control of the the colour settings.

see Add more power to 10.5's screen sharing