Apple Remote Desktop problem solved

I decided to buy Apple Remote Desk­top because I was tired of using Chicken of the VNC and oth­ers for sev­eral reasons.

• Key­boards were not work­ing prop­erly and I need to be able to switch between Swedish, Eng­lish and Japanese.
• My Mac Pro is set up with dual mon­i­tors, I like this when work­ing with video edit­ing. Other VNC soft­ware were not able to han­dle dual displays.
• Drag and drop between win­dows did not work.

 

So I pur­chased Apple Remote Desk­top (ARM). Of course, ARM was too much for what I needed with lots of other func­tions but I thought the screen shar­ing should be per­fect with it. It turned out later that is was very good! 

Prob­lem was that I could con­nect to all Macs, except for my MacPro. I got either “con­nec­tion failed” or “authen­ti­ca­tion failed” errors. Annoy­ing. First I though it was because of my dual dis­plays, but it was not. Next I searched the net and got some ideas to remove .plist-files and to make sure ARM clients were freshly installed. Still the same error.

I then started to think that there was a prob­lem with the VNC port or that it was blocked, so I ran
sudo lsof ‑i ‑P | grep ‑i “lis­ten”
in a ter­mi­nal win­dow. I could then see that there was OSXvnc-se and that it was hold­ing the 5900 port. On the com­put­ers that were work­ing fine with ARM, it was not like that, they had AppleVNCS run­ning instead. It turned out that it was because I had installed Vine Server for OS X that OSXvnc-se was run­ning instead. Before I pur­chased Apple Remote Desk­top, I had used Vine Server together with Chicken of the VNC. Even after select­ing Remote Man­age­ment in Sys­tem Pref­er­ences — Shar­ing, the Vine Server would “steal” sport 5900 and th ARM client could not get it. What I had to then, was to unin­stall Vine Server.

Solu­tion

1. Finder — Appli­ca­tion, open Vine Server
2. Click the but­ton “Stop Sys­tem Server”
3. Exit the Vine Server software
4. in Ter­mi­nal, cd /Library/LaunchAgents
5. sudo rm com.redstonesoftware.VineServer.plist (not really nec­es­sary, but nice to clean up)
6. Move Vine Server from Appli­ca­tions folder to Trash
7. Reboot
8. In Ter­mi­nal, run sudo lsof ‑i ‑P | grep ‑i “lis­ten” and con­firm that AppleVNCS is running

The idea on how to unin­stall was found on another site. Of course, soft­ware from Apple can­not check for all kinds of soft­ware installed before installing, it was kind of my fault that I had installed some­thing that was hold­ing the port. But it would be nice it there would be a warn­ing that AppleVNCS is not in charge of port 5900 after check­ing “Remote Man­age­ment” in the Shar­ing of Sys­tem Pref­er­ences. It would then be nice if there would be a dia­logue ask­ing whether you want to use “Apple Remote Desk­top AppleVNCS” of if you want to con­tinue to use “OSXvnc-se” for screen sharing.