Lion broke screen sharing, VNC?

The VNC program I have on my iPad works fine. I notice the i in iSSH. If it is a third party program, you might need to wait for a Lion-compatible update or you could try an alternative.

what program are you using?

None of the suggestions worked for me...I had to install Vine Server (beta for Lion) and it works great.

Once you get the "empty gray screen" type your username+return and pwd+return. It will login into then...

The standard is called RFB:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFB_protocol

Not that anybody cares about standards anymore. NIH rules! Cool stuff, please, whether it works or not.

marco202, bless you.

I was about to give up. that is so not obvious.

It is a bit flakey. For others suffering along.

- I have trouble with an adhoc network, every time vnc viewer tries to connect the serving computer drops off its own network.

- using a router, connects..

but if you get the grey lion backdrop you must login. just bring up the keyboard and type away, enter between user name and password

So, I have a client whose computer I could log into remotely using the "Screen sharing" app on my computer. However, after they upgraded to Lion, this stopped working. However, I can still log in remotely using iChat. Of course, this requires them to be sitting at their computer and initiate the chat, and sometimes there's work it's easier to do when they're not busy at the computer.

I've seen instructions telling me to turn off all remote management and sharing, and then restart them twice... I will give that another try and see if it works.

One other question - I had the router set up to open the ports for screen sharing over the internet. Is it possible these ports changed from Snow Leopard to Lion?

I'm trying to use any free VNC client from Windows to OSx. Have been on Lion since 10.7.1.

And with the introduction of 10.7.3 - I'm still trying.

My preferred client is TightVNC - still get either the grey screen with a box that freezes and you can't enter anything or nothing at all.

by making the OSX machine not log on automatically - I can at least access it once from reboot - but that's no solution.

Tried multiple VNC clients, no joy.

Reinstalled the old Remote client software on the mac - it worked once, reboot, fails again.

Seems to me Apple need to fix this.

As I wrote above, once you get the "empty gray screen" type your username+return and pwd+return. It will login into then...

Hello,

I have been able to use VNC with Lion by (a) doing the ARD reboot trick (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3289794?start=0&tstart=0) and (b) using a VNC client that allows for Mac authentication rather than VNC authentication. Namely, iTeleport for the iPhone/iPod Touch and Jolly's Fast VNC for Mac.

Ben

Hi Marco/Ben

I should have mentioned - I've tried most every method over the last 7 pages of suggestions over the last 2 months.

Marco - no that didn't work for me prior to 10.7.2 and still doesn't.

Ben - I'm using a windows machine - but even so, the ARD reboot trick works once (sometimes - not every time), then subsequent attempts fail.

And we VNC into our mac mini's multiple times a day, so it's not a practical solution - we have several doing different things.

Only one of them is on Lion for testing until this is resolved - the VNC clients work wonderfully on 10.6 (and did on 10.5, 10.4 etc)

And we've tried multiple clients - RealVNC, TightVNc, UltraVNC etc etc.

I've been testing for weeks.

I am with you. Able to VNC once or twice after reboot. Then after a while VNC will prompt for the first Screen Sharing password, it will get past it, then show a gray screen. This gray screen has Apple logo, fields for username and password, and buttons for Sleep Restart Shutdown. No response if I type username [Enter] password [Enter]. No response when I click anywhere with mouse.

The VNC client is on Windows 7 (same with XP and Vista). This is the gray screen. I'm on 10.7.2. Not moving to 10.7.3 until the CUI issue is properly addressed.

I should also mention, BSO, that VNC from a windows client doesn't work for me with 10.7.1 or 10.7.2.

Not sure if you were saying you were alright on 10.7.2.

Perhaps 10.7.4 will allow us to upgrade when Apple fix the issue.

Worryingly, I notice major advances in 'Mountain Lion' today - good grief, they've not even sorted out Lion yet!

I have the same exact problem TightVNC on Windows just freezes at the gray screen. You can't login, you can't do anything. It's obnoxious how unusable VNC is in Lion. This should be addressed immediately by Apple.

I have finally upgraded to 10.7.3. Pretty much the same problem.

Case 1 using Vine VNC Server

1. On Mac install Vine VNC Server. I set the port to something other than the regular VNC port to prevent standard port hacking. I have an 8-character VNC password.

2. On PC (I have Windows 7) install RealVNC free version. I set the Color Level to Full <-- this is essential.

3. The viewer can now connect to Mac with the right VNC password. My current testing is with a foreground user already logged in. This is the common usage of VNC anyway.

4. Play around and quit RealVNC.

5. Repeat 3 and 4 a few times. Eventually VNC View will not be able to connect giving "unknown message type" error.

This behavior is the same in 10.7.2 and 10.7.3. Once the error occurs it will not work consistently until Vine Server is restarted.

I have also tried free Mocha VNC Viewer on iPad/iPhone. Same behavior.

Case 2 Using Screen Sharing

1. On Mac turn on screen sharing with a strong 8-character password.

2. On Windows 7 use Real VNC Viewer (same color level as above) to connect to Mac

3. After entering password, got a gray screen with login prompts (see my screen dump above). Tried entering username / login at this screen. No response whatsoever.

4. Moving the cursor around inside the gray screen area causes the Mac's cursor to turn to a color wheel in response to the mouse movement on PC side.

5. The top right corner of the gray screen (not captured in above screen dump) is a clock. The time displayed never changes.

I conclude Mac is not using standard and correct VNC protocol. There is not much we can do on our ends.