Remote Desktop: Tips for assigning a VNC password to multiple clients

  • Last Modified: August 15, 2008
  • Article: HT2790
  • Old Article: 302242

Summary

If you're an administrator and need to assign the same VNC password to multiple clients, this article can help. The quickest method for assigning a VNC password to a client or multiple clients is to start with a computer that is already configured with VNC access enabled, and to propagate those settings to other clients. Here's how.

Products Affected

Apple Remote Desktop

Enable VNC access (on test machine)

  1. Go to your admin computer, or a client computer, that either has VNC access enabled or it can be enabled.
  2. From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.
  3. Click Sharing.
  4. Select the Apple Remote Desktop service (by clicking its name, not necessarily its checkbox).
  5. Click Access Privileges.
  6. In the resulting dialog, select the "VNC viewers may control screen with password" checkbox.
  7. Enter a VNC password in the field to the right. The password you enter will be the password you assign to other clients later.
  8. Click OK.

Copy the preference file

If your test computer is not your admin computer, then you'll need to copy the VNC preference file from the test computer to your admin computer. The VNC preferences are stored in this file:

 

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.VNCSettings.txt

Assign the VNC password to multiple clients

  1. On your admin computer, choose a client (or list of clients) to receive the password.
  2. Select the Copy Items command.
  3. Add the local copy of the com.apple.VNCSettings.txt file.
  4. From the Place Items pop-up menu, choose Specify full path.
  5. When prompted, enter the following destination path:
    /Library/Preferences/
  6. Select Copy to run the Copy Items task.
  7. When it's done, send the following Unix command to the same range of clients:

    /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -configure -clientopts -setvnclegacy -vnclegacy yes
     
  8. If you wish to disable VNC access, you can run the following Unix command:

    /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -configure -clientopts -setvnclegacy -vnclegacy no
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