Raymond.CC Blog

Windows XP and Windows 2003 has a built-in Remote Desktop for you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer.
Let me give you an example of what remote access if you’re still unsure.
Lets say I am in Singapore and my mum is in HongKong. My mum called me and told me that she doesn’t know how to insert a picture in a Word document. It’s very expensive to explain it over on the phone. What I can do is to connect to my mum’s computer and I will insert the picture to a Word document while she watch how it’s being done. I can actually control the remote computer without me being there.

Okay, back to what I want to post. I have 3 Apple Mac OS X Servers on a rack and I would want to remote control it on my Windows XP notebook. Apple does have a built-in Apple Remote Desktop (ARD), but I couldn’t find anything about using Windows to remote access Apple through ARD.


Thanks to Redstone Software Inc, developers of Eggplant for cross-platform testing and automation of OSXvnc.

We can now install VNC server on Mac OS X Server and then use any Windows platform VNC viewer such as TightVNC, RealVNC or UltraVNC. It’s Open Source, that’s why there are so many versions of VNC. But don’t worry, any version should work fine.

I am able to successfully connect to 1 of my Mac OS X Server eventhough I received an error message “unknown message type 255″ but I faced a problem connecting 2 of my Mac OS X Servers.

Both the settings are exactly the same and I have no idea why it wouldn’t work for the other 2 Mac OS X Server.
When connecting using RealVNC, I receive error message “No matching security types. Do you wish to attempt to reconnect to Server2?”.

I tried using TightVNC to connect and it said “Incompatible Version”.

It must be something wrong with the server since both Clients didn’t work. But it still doesn’t make sense why it worked for only 1 Mac OS X Server and rest of the 2 didn’t.
I noticed that VNC uses port 5900 to connect and I also noticed that OSXvnc on my servers automatically changed the port to 5901 on the settings.
I checked the VNC viewer and didn’t find anywhere where I can define which port to connect to. That means it must have connect to the default port 5900! And my VNC server is on 5901! No wonder it didn’t connect!

The simple solution to “No matching security types” and “Incompatible Version” is define the port at your VNC Viewer.

Take a close look and make sure you use double colon :: after the IP address because a single colon wouldn’t work.
Now you should be able to remote control your Apple computer from your Windows ;)

You would want to ask why did VNC server automatically changes the port to 5901 and not use the default port 5900?
This is because you must have enabled Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) which ALSO uses port 5900. I found out that Apple Remote Desktop is also based on VNC but they modified it heavily and that’s why you couldn’t use any VNC viewer.

Hope this article will provide the solution to “No matching security types” and “Incompatible Version” problems when connecting from Windows to Mac OS X through VNC.