Q: screen sharing broken again after update to 3.7 without Mavericks upgrade

I found a solution.

"screensharingd" is left in "Deny Lists" of "Firewall Options".

Deleting it, ARD 3.7.1 works well as I expect.

After rebooting, it also works well.

Sorry to have bothered you.

OK, well, what if you don't have "screensharingd" listed in the "Deny Lists" of "Firewall Options"? Then what?

kilgo wrote:

 

OK, well, what if you don't have "screensharingd" listed in the "Deny Lists" of "Firewall Options"? Then what?

ARD works well, of course.

I believe this is the easiest way to resolve any screensharing issue in MacOSX: Solution: Reset the computer list in Screen Sharing. To acomplish that install OnyX. By the way a great tool for your Mac maintenance.

• Go to Cleaning>Misc. and
• check My Computers list in Screen Sharing.
• Press Execute and wait until it finish.
• Restart your computer.

The Onyx solution worked for me. Thanks!

Let's refine my comment above slightly. I can do screen sharing but still can't do file sharing, e.g. "connect as" in the finder window. Any thoughts? I am using 10.9.1 on the new iMac, and 10.8.5 on a 4 yr old iMac.

A work around, that fixed the issue for me [after upgrading to 10.9.1]...

On you Mac...

Select: Apple, System Preferences, Security & Privacy, Firewall, and turn Firewall: Off

There is next to zero risk to turning Firewall: Off, your Airport provides a Firewall...

I have OS X 10.9.1 with everything updated. I changed the permissions of screensharingd and tried to clean the My computers list, but the screen sharing still didn't work with the firewal on. But I found a solution. The problem I had was that the domain in the local computer name which one can change in the Sharing preference pannel (e.g. the part "local" in "mycomputer.local") didn't match the local domain I have set in my wireless router - in my case I had set it to "lan". After changing the local domain of my router to "local" and restarting my mac (say perhaps restarting the firewall only could work, but I didn't try) ARD to this machine started working with the firewall on. Hope this helps.

With screen sharing 3.7.1, and Mavericks 10.9.1 & ML 10.8.5, it seems to be working again...

I don't know when it happened, but I only checked recently.

I tried everything in the book with no success. and this afternoon, I found a screen sharing subfolder in ~library/Application Support

I wiped the file in that directory  (apparently a shortcut to my remote machine) on the computer I was using to access my remote machine and voila. I have now recovered Remote access after 3 months of struggle.

Note it seems that in my case the problem was not on the server side (the remote mac mini) but on the client side (my  macbook air)

I hope it will help someone.

This has been driving me crazy for months but I finally solved my problem.  I had tried many suggestions without success, including but not limited to:

- removing/adding things to the firewall settings

- downgrading/upgrading the remote desktop app

- downgrading/upgrading OS

- port-forwarding in airport express

- fixing permissions

In the end the default VNC port (5900) was blocked on the machine I was trying to access.  The port was blocked even after allowing connections for Remote Management and Screen Sharing in the firewall settings.

I had to fix things through terminal but fortunately it was an easy fix. 

First I checked what firewall rules currently existed using this command:

sudo ipfw show

You will need to enter your password.

From the output table I could see that traffic for port 5900 was being denied.  The line looked something like:

25900 deny tcp from any to any dst-port 5900 in

The solution was to erase all the firewall rules using this command:

sudo ipfw flush

After I did this I was able to use the native screen sharing software from all devices on my network.

I hope this helps someone.

Interesting...

OS X Mavericks reports the following..

IPFW(8)                   BSD System Manager's Manual

NAME ipfw

DESCRIPTION This utility is DEPRECATED. Please use pfctl(8) instead.

Darwin                    September 27, 2012

Deprecation: is a status applied most commonly to a computer software feature, characteristic, or practice indicating it should be avoided, typically because it is being superseded. Beyond software the term is also sometimes used for a feature, design, or practice that is permitted but no longer recommended in other areas, such as hardware design or compliance to building codes.

I am not an expert by any means but let me try to help out.

Without getting into it, IPFW and PF are basically different types of firewalls with PF being more powerful.

In Mavericks or if you have PF setup you can use the following to show the current rules:

sudo pfctl -sr

You can flush the rules via:

sudo pfctl -F rules

That should achieve the same thing.  Good luck.

before every shutdown or restart, I delete the firewall prefs file. after restart, I reconfigure the Firewall. it's the only thing that guarantees that the firewall works as expected.

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist

I use an AppleScript to delete the file and run it from the AppleScript menu before any restart/shutdown.

do shell script "sudo rm -f /Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist" user name "adminName" password "adminPassword" with administrator privileges

copy the result to r

if r is "" then

          set alertTxt to "Done."

else

          set alertTxt to "Error?" & return & r

end if

display alert alertTxt

I'm also experimenting with a script placed in ~/Library/StartupItems/

tell application "System Preferences"

  activate

          set current pane to pane "com.apple.preference.security"

          display alert "Check the Firewall preferences."

end tell

I was getting this error as well.  Here is what was causing mine...

Be sure to check that your client is trying to connect to the correct screen sharing port in ARD.  For some reason my screen sharing port changed from 5900 to 5903.  The default is 5900.  This was giving me this error even though ADC was telling me that it was connected and everything, I was not able bring up screen sharing.