Tuesday, February 12, 2008

LAN VNC Password workaround

As an administrator of a large network, when I came on board, one of the first things I did was to install tightVNC on all the (then, Windows 2000 Pro) machines so I didn't have to walk everywhere for every little thing.

It worked wonders, and I had one password for all the machines... until I had a few machines that needed another password because I needed specific people to have access and remember a password. and then I promptly forgot it because I don't record passwords anywhere. First, because I am admin, I have no problem to change passwords on accounts and let my users know what happened. Second, I feel it does provide some positive mental vibe toward me as an admin that the users can keep their favorite passwords secret to themselves.

But you want to know about the title...
So I forget the VNC passwords. I don't have to know them, exactly. I just need to be able to get remote registry to the destination computer. I open up regedit and click File, Connect Network Registry... and type in the name/IP address of my other LAN PC. Then I drill down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3\Default and look at the Data Column of Password.
It might look like:
f3 36 15 94 f1 11 f8 a7

I create a text file remote.vnc as follows:

[connection]
host=remotemachinename
port=5900
password=f3361594f111f8a7

and now I have a file that I can double-click and connect to the remotemachine, assuming of course, that .vnc files are associated with tightVNC (default is yes).

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