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Showing posts from January, 2008

Live Fast, Crash Hard

Over the last few months, my friends and I are starting to find there's something very wrong in the state of Mac remote clients. I don't have a huge number of computers, but I have enough to make the use of VNC (the free screen-sharing system originally developed by Olivetti Labs at Cambridge) necessary. I used to have a mix of Macs and Windows systems, so some years ago I settled on VNC as the lowest common denominator method of connecting to one machine from another. VNC server runs as a native service on Windows, and there are mainstream clients which work well. On the Mac, it used to be that the canonical server was OSXvnc, now incorporated into Redstone's vine server . For a VNC viewer I used Chicken of the VNC . Chicken has a reputation for being very slow but very stable and my experience certainly bore this out. Then came OS X 10.4 (Tiger) which exposed the Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) screen sharing service in the Sharing preference pane. ARD uses another version