Screen Sharing does not accept my password anymore

Same issue here, however, I have found that the VNC viewer on the Mac side doesn't like uppercase or special characters. I have set a generic password, all lower case and numbers not special characters and it will work.

Hi,

I have the very same issue with a MacBook Pro. I used to be able to screen share with the short username 'Admin' but since some time after 10.6.8 update and before the iTunes etc. updates it all stopped working. I have recently found that I CAN screen share if I use the full 'Administrator' username.

Phil

I am having the same problem.

Sadly, it doesn't work for me.

Still not working for me, either. None of the suggestions have fixed the behavior. It seems to be the server side, since I ran software updates on the client side and that didn't break anything, but as soon as I ran the updates on the server, it broke the connection. I tried kinit and kdestroy as suggested on one of the three threads about this breaking on 10.6.8, and that didn't help either. I am contemplating putting another VNC server on the computer.

Sadly, I have been slowly replacing the built in functionality of the Mac Server OS (on the regular OS I don't need these things as much) with third party apps for some time now because of these sorts of things. Every time an update comes something seems to break or doesn't work quite right out of the box. FTP, Java, MySQL/PHP, rsync to name a few, and now VNC.

Sorry if this makes you feel stupid. I had the same problem with 4 macs in the house. The problem manifested after the latest set of Lion-related updates (all my macs are still on Snow Leopard). After stopping everything and running software update to get all the gear running the same version of everything, I still could not get screen sharing to work, getting the login error despite connecting ok via finder.

It was really a very simple fix, at least in my case. Many of us, especially i/t geeks, will set up our user account with a more unix-like user-id. For example "John Doe" will have the user-id "doej" or something of the sort. That user-id was the value I used when connecting via finder and screen sharing. Thinking back to some crazy Windows login problems, I tried using my "display name" on the account (instead of the actual user-id) in the user-id field of the authentication popup for screen sharing instead. The display name (most people just put their real name in when running setup) is what appears for your account in the initial login list on start up. It worked.

Sorry if that didn't come out right. I should have taken the time to get the correct labels off of the user preferences dialogue and it would have made more sense.

When you create a new user, there are two fields: one for "Full Name" (typically the user's actual name) and another for "Account name" (this usually a more Unix-like user-id). On my system, typing "John Doe" into the Full Name box automatically populates "johndoe" into the Account Name box. I would guess the majority of Mac users will leave that default in there, type in a password and hint and complete creating the account.

Interestingly, you cannot view the Account name in the user preferences dialogue once the account is created. However, the Account name is used as the name of your Home folder.

In the past, I've used that Account name when connecting to shares in finder. I just verified that when you open finder and click "Connect As" and choose "Registered User," the authentication prompt in SL automatically has the Account name in the user field. Once connected in finder, all I had to do is click Screen Sharing and it would just open up. Presumably since I had already authenticated via finder. After the last updates, I started getting a password prompt only when attempting to start screen sharing. Finder still worked the same as before, and I was able to view all my folders. Using the Full Name instead of the Account name got me through the second password prompt and opened the screen sharing session.

I tried authenticating the finder with the Full Name instead, and still got the second authentication prompt when launching screen sharing. Clearly Apple has made a change to screen sharing that no longer passes through your finder authentication.

If you've somehow already been using the Full Name, and not the Account name, to authenticate in finder, this fix doesn't help you.

What I meant by "feeling stupid" is going to great lengths to step through a lot of troublesome reboots and whatnot, only to discover that the problem is an arcane, and apparently pointless change with which user name on the account authenticates for two apparently related features (you do go through finder to get to screen sharing!). I certainly didn't mean you were stupid. I wouldn't blame you for having to figure out something Apple changed up after years for no apparent reason. I wasn't real happy about it either after wasting an hour or so figuring it out. My poor choice of words was really meant in the spirit of that "d'oh!" moment when you find the trivial 5 second fix after spending that hour (or days) doing lots of potentially risky stuff to no avail.

Great answer. That worked for me. Thanks

Yep I feel your pain. The 10.6.8 update changed a lot of things, no Idea why I thought it just me. I have not seen any fixes yet.

I'm having similar problems here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3218006?tstart=0

Thanks for the hints, I'll try when I get home.

Sweet Sassy Molassy! That was it! Thanks, th0mas_l. I wouldn't even have thought to enter my full name since the computer kept autofilling my account name. I was going deep into the bowels of kerberos nonsense to try to figure out what was going on. The confusing thing is that you can connect with your account name if you connect via the machine's IP address.

th0mas_l wrote:

I tried using my "display name" on the account (instead of the actual user-id)

Thanks so much. I was having this issue after upgrading Mac OS X Server 10.6.7 to 10.6.8, and using my full name instead of my account name was exactly the solution. I never would have thought of that.

th0mas_l wrote:

Interestingly, you cannot view the Account name in the user preferences dialogue once the account is created.

Actually you can but it's concealed. On Mac OS X Snow Leopard (client version), in the Accounts pane of System Preferences, click the lock to unlock it (if necessary), then Control-click (or right-click) the account name in the list, and select the menu item that appears: Advanced Options. Probably a good idea to heed the warning about not changing any values there unless you know exactly what will happen.