How to Fix Non-Responsive VNC Connection on Your Mac Mini

Hey there

i use VNC to remote into my Mac at home - 2020 Mac Mini, M1, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Ventura 13.2.1. It keeps freezing on me, totally non-responsive and if i close VNC and try to reconnect it never does. This is both inside and outside of my home network. Doesn't matter which VNC client i'm using - Real, Ultra, Tight and Screens (Edovia) is doing the same thing.

After some testing i've found it's the screensharingd process which is crashing. As a workaround i've forwarded the SSH port from my router to SSH in and kill the process, which immediately restarts and i can VNC back in. The

more times i do this the more frequently it crashes and after killing it 6 or 7 times the machine needs restarting because screensharingd is crashing in under a minute.

This has been happening since before i upgraded to Ventura. I've run First Aid on both the disk and partition but that hasn't made a difference.

Aside from the inconvenience of it freezing while i'm in the middle of doing something, leaving the SSH port open on my router is making me a bit nervous.

A wipe and OS reinstall is usually my way of fixing anything i can't figure out straight away, but for various reasons just not possible right now.

Anyone seen this before? any ideas how i can fix it? Can i replace the screensharingd.plist file with one from my MBP?

Any suggestions greatly appreciated

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Mac mini, macOS 13.2

Posted on Mar 20, 2023 4:57 AM

Top-ranking reply

emptyrepublic

Level 1

10 points

Posted on Feb 22, 2024 8:28 AM

So, going to response to my own issue here. I revisited this thread about a week ago as I was continuing to have the problem with screensharingd crashing or locking up while in a screen sharing session.

I took note of the message by @Olivier Noma regarding attacks against port 5900. In hindsight, it was of course bad practice but I had port 5900 exposed externally so I could connect to my small home server from work or while traveling. So I decided to just delete the port forwarding rule one my router without any other change to see what happened.

Absolutely stable since. I don't know if this would address everyone's problem in this disscussion thread, but for me the issue was attacks against 5900. Imagine the service was getting overloaded when I was running a session and would crash. I'm not sure how likely Apple is able to fix that (if able).

Here's what I'm doing now when I want to remote into my servers (I have two in different locations).

1) I now use Tailscale, a solution I highly recommend. For those who aren't familiar I suggest you investigate because it's amazing and solves a lot of problems integrating devices across different networks. Essentially, when a I have a device on my Tailscale network it appears and sees all other devices on my Tailscale network a local device regardless of the network it's actually connected to (the mesh networking protocol is pretty amazing). Again, highly recommend this solution as it's free for personal/small scale use.

2) If I'm wanting to use Screen Sharing on a system where I cannot install Tailscale (like at work), I've left SSH service open on the router to the servers. Now, I'll run a tunnel through SSH so the VNC client connection is routed through the SSH tunnel and then once on the server connects 5900. It's an extra step but it works very well (is more secure) and SSH is not as vulnerable to attack as 5900.

Again, since switching to this setup about a week ago screensharingd has be completely stable. So, for me the problem is solved.

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How to Fix Non-Responsive VNC Connection on Your Mac Mini

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