Mac OS X Server has pretty decent screen sharing and remote desktop features out of the box to manage you headles OS X Server remotely. This works great when you have a Mac OS X desktop or laptop, but I found out today requires some additional setup when you’re using a Microsoft windows client.
The tehcnology used by Apple is VNC, which is a very mature and generally available protocol for which multiple mature clients exists on different platforms. However, Apple has decided to use its own authentication model between the client and the server out of the box (for probably good reasons, not sure though which but they probably wanted to use GSSAPI again). However, the default VNC authentication is not enables out of the box and requires some additional setup to enable access from standard VNC clients.
Today I found myself needing to do some administrative tasks I knew I could do easily through a remote desktop connection, but since I was a few thousand kilometers away and only had my (Windows 7) work laptop with me, could not do. It turned out I had to enable some settings to allow "classic" (actually standard) VNC clients to connect and authenticate with the Mac OS X remote desktop (VNC) server. Furtunately it turned out to be possible not only through the graphical interface but, as many times with OS X, there was also a command line way to make the necessary adjustments. Running the following command:
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -configure -clientopts -setvnclegacy -vnclegacy yes -setvncpw -vncpw PASSWORD
where PASSWORD is the password to be provided to authorize a standard VNC connection.
With the above command executed through an SSH connection over VPN I was able to enable standard VNC support on my Mac OS X Server and logged in (again though the VPN connection) on my server’s desktop remotely using a standard VNC client.
Just to be complete, the option to use a standard VNC client can be disabled using:
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -configure -clientopts -setvnclegacy -vnclegacy no