(Solved) How to fix VNC ARD screen sharing in Lion
How to fix VNC, Apple Remote Desktop (ARD), and screen sharing in OS X 10.7 Lion.
You can skip all the other threads and just read this.
First let's fix the Lion computer.
- Open System Preferences > Sharing
- Turn OFF Screen Sharing, Remote Login, Remote Management, and Remote Apple Events (just turn everything off)
- Now turn ON Screen Sharing, Remote Login, Remote Management, and Remote Apple Events
- Now turn everything OFF again. We have just "kickstarted" those services.
- Now enable the services you want. If you just want to access your computer through VNC or screen sharing, just turn on Screen Sharing.
- If you want Windows computers to access it, go to Screen Sharing > Computer Settings, click the VNC checkbox, and enter a VNC password.
If you administer a bunch of computers with ARD, then turn Remote Managment on. If you don't know what that last sentence means, leave Remote Management and remote Apple Events off.
The computer should now work. If not, reboot it.
If it still doesn't work, then you should try downgrading to ARD 3.4, but I don't think this is necessary.
Let's access the Lion computer from another Mac:
- From the other Mac, open /System/Library/Core Services/
- There is an application called Screen Sharing. Make an alias of it (click and drag while holding Apple and Option) in the Applications folder. Or drag it to the Dock.
- Now open the alias (or click the Dock icon).
- Type in the Bonjour name or IP address of your computer.
- Enter your OS X username and password.
- Tell it to save your password.
Viola, now you can use this to connect to your Lion computer, without having to login twice. You can also connect to Windows computers running VNC with it.
You can also connect by going to the Finder and hitting Apple-K or going to the Finder menubar Go > Connect to Server and finding the correct server. That will then launch Screen Sharing.
Let's access the Lion computer from a Windows PC:
- Open your VNC client
- Enter the Lion computer IP address
- Enter your VNC password
- You will now have to re-login with your OS X user password (unless you get a Windows client that supports direct login, but I don't know of one at the moment)
Let's access the Lion computer from an iPhone or iPad:
You could download Screens from the Apple store or...
- Download Mocha VNC Lite from the Apple store for free
- Configure Mocha but enter not just the VNC password, but also the Mac OS X user and password
- Viola, you can now VNC without logging in twice.
What did we actually do?
The key is called kickstarting ARD. You can find info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2370, We did this manually by turning them on and then off.
This is like rebooting those systems. Once rebooted, they should work correctly. I don't believe that downgrading to ARD 3.4 is necessary, but instructions are here from Reubania https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3190260?start=15&tstart=0 (towards the bottom).
The second issue is around double-login. If you run a multiuser machine, this is a great feature. For most people, it's annoying to login twice. By configuring the Screen Sharing and Mocha apps to use OS X authentication, we bypass this annoyance. If you want to have double login for multi-user reasons, simply don't setup/save your password, or save the password for the account you do want to login with.
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.1), Apple Remote Desktop
