VNCScan is a powerful tool that can you can use to administer most aspects of computer management.  The vast majority of our feedback says that we’ve done a great job so far of making the tool as intuitive and easy to use as possible for a program with this large of a feature set.  We’ve looked at how competing products have bloated their options to almost usability and have been trying hard not to let that happen to VNCScan. 

With that being said, there are some common pitfalls that you can run into with any application that needs to access remote computers in an administrative role and this article series is here to help you though some of the most common of them.

If you have a suggestion for this series on VNCScan Network Troubleshooting, please leave a comment.  I read them every day.

Access Denied

This is probably one of the most common support requests that we see here.  There are a lot of causes for getting an “Access Denied” error when deploying VNCScan, running scripts, or performing the many other remote Windows management tasks.  Some of these may seem like a no-brainer to you while others may be unexpected.

Set your Administrative account in VNCScan.

Let’s start by making sure that you have supplied Administrative credentials to VNCScan for it to use when connecting to remote computers.  Even if you are currently logged into your computer as a Domain Admin, it’s still a good idea to tell VNCScan what username and password to use when running scripts because it needs to pass those credentials to commands that don’t necessarily run under the context of the currently logged in user.

If you would like to use your domain admin username/password, the best place to put this into VNCScan would be the main program preferences. 

You can fine tune this by overriding this username and password in the group properties as well as the individual computer properties.

Multiple Connections Error 1219

This problem may be affecting your ability to log in even if you don’t see the actual error message.  You may simply get something that says “Access Denied” when in reality, it’s happening because you’ve already logged into the remote workstation with an account that doesn’t have administrative access. 

Here’s how to test that:

• Open a Command Prompt window on your computer
• Type:
      NET USE \\ComputerName\c$ /user:administrativeaccount password
      Replace ComputerName with the name of the remote computer
      Replace administrativeaccount with your administrator username
      Replace password with your actual password
• Hit Enter and make note of the result

If you get an Access Denied, then the username that you are using is not administrative on the remote system.   You’ll need to stop there and resolve that problem before moving forward.

Other tricks around this include assigning multiple DNS names to a computer on your DNS Server or simply using the /DELETE switch for NET USE to delete the preexisting connection.  NET USE /? will give full details on how to use this command.

Conclusion

Well, that’s it for this article.  In the next article, we will discuss firewall ports and other network related connectivity issues that may come into play.

I look forward to reading all of your comments and suggestions for this topic.

Key Data Folders

The data files are stored in three key folders;

• Data – Stores all of your program settings, group settings, and computer settings.
• Jobs – Stores all of your remote scripts.  Each script job has a subfolder named after that job.  That subfolder contains all of the files required to push and execute that job on a remote computer.
• Profiles – Stores all of your VNC deployment profiles.  Each deployment profile gets a subfolder named after it.

The Root

All three of these key folders must be stored with in the same Root folder.  By default, the Root folder is “My Documents\VNCScan”.

The first time that VNCScan runs, it checks the registry key “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VNCScan\SettingsDataPath” for the path to the root location.

If that registry key holds no data or if the path doesn’t exist, it will create the required folders at the default location and start fresh with new data.

The Key Files

Both of the following files must reside in the Data folder:

· Settings.xml – This file holds all of the initial settings for the console. This file stores anything that is global to the application.

· Groups.xml – This holds all of your group names along with their settings. You will find XML files in the same folder named after the group names, also. These files hold the computers and their settings.

To take this a step further, we’ve modified the ping window that happens when you right-click a computer and choose “Ping Computer”.  Instead of just opening a command window with the standard ping command running, we’ve designed our own.  We’ve done this in order to bring you an exciting new feature – automatically running commands or connecting when a computer responds for X number of consecutive pings.

Here’s a quick video showing how: http://screencast.com/t/CqJI7YhE

Download the latest version here!

If you are using McAfee on your network, you can use the following detection log as a checklist of files that need to be added to your “exclusion list” inside your antivirus properties.

You may also want to look into your McAfee settings for ways to change the default action from DELETE to LOG. We’ve notified McAfee of this problem and are awaiting a response. If this problem is affecting you, please contact them at vendor_questions@mcafee.com.

9/19/2008 11:30:01 AM Scan Started BMSANWS4LZ13D1\SYSTEM (managed) VirusScan 8.5 on demand friday scan
9/19/2008 11:36:51 AM Deleted SYSTEM C:\FASTPUSH\VNC7\REALVNC4\LOGMESSAGES.DLL RemAdm-VNCView(Remote Admin Tool)
9/19/2008 11:36:51 AM Deleted SYSTEM c:\fastpush\vnc7\realvnc4\logmessages.dll RemAdm-VNCView(Remote Admin Tool)
9/19/2008 11:36:52 AM Deleted SYSTEM C:\FASTPUSH\VNC7\REALVNC4\VNCCONFIG.EXE RemAdm-VNCView(Remote Admin Tool)
9/19/2008 11:36:52 AM Deleted SYSTEM c:\fastpush\vnc7\realvnc4\vncconfig.exe RemAdm-VNCView(Remote Admin Tool)
9/19/2008 11:36:52 AM Deleted SYSTEM C:\FASTPUSH\VNC7\REALVNC4\WINVNC4.EXE RemAdm-VNCView(Remote Admin Tool)
9/19/2008 11:36:52 AM Deleted SYSTEM c:\fastpush\vnc7\realvnc4\winvnc4.exe RemAdm-VNCView(Remote Admin Tool)
9/19/2008 11:36:52 AM Deleted SYSTEM C:\FASTPUSH\VNC7\REALVNC4\WM_HOOKS.DLL RemAdm-VNCView(Remote Admin Tool)
9/19/2008 11:36:52 AM Deleted SYSTEM c:\fastpush\vnc7\realvnc4\wm_hooks.dll RemAdm-VNCView(Remote Admin Tool)
9/19/2008 11:36:53 AM Deleted SYSTEM C:\FASTPUSH\VNC7\ULTRA\WINVNC.EXE RemAdm-VNCView(Remote Admin Tool)
9/19/2008 11:36:53 AM Deleted SYSTEM c:\fastpush\vnc7\ultra\winvnc.exe RemAdm-VNCView(Remote Admin Tool)

Error writing to “C:\users\[username]\appdata\roaming\bozteck\vncscan console.net\2008.8.6.231\vncscan.cmd

This error occurrs when the beyondexecv2.exe is missing from the program folder. The quick way to fix this is to do an add/remove of vncscan and then run the setup again.

The manual fix for this is to copy the beyondexecv2.exe file from c:\fastpush\vnc7\utils folder into the “C:\Program Files\Bozteck\VNCScan Console .NET” folder.

Information

This error goes way back to the early days of Windows networking and it’s shameful that Microsoft hasn’t corrected it, yet. A Windows computer can connect to a network resource such as a remote share only once with a single set of credentials.

For example, if I log onto the domain as bozteck\steveb and map a drive to \\server1\share1 using that account, I can not later issue a command to connect to \\server1\share2 supplying alternate user credentials in the command line. My computer can only authenticate me against \\server1 once. If I try, I will get the error above.

The Work Around

There’s a simple way to trick Windows into thinking that \\server1 is a completely different machine, allowing you to authenticate against it a second time. If the IP address for \\server1 is 10.1.1.1, you simply reference it by that IP address of \\10.1.1.1\share2 and pass it the set of credentials required to connect. Windows treats \\server1 and \\10.1.1.1 as completely different machines!

You can do this in VNCScan in a few locations depending on the scope that you wish to apply. Most people just do it globally in the main program preferences.

There’s an option there labeled, “Use IP address instead of HostName”. Checking this box will allow you to get around this error. There is a similarly worded checkbox in both the group properties and computer properties.

Maybe some day Microsoft will widen up this limitation but until then, this should get you by.

If you have the XP firewall enabled, there’s very little that you can do in the way of remote management for these PC’s. Fortunately, there are was to automate the configuration of the XP firewalls on your network depending on what type of a network you are using.

Login Script Method

The easiest way to do this is with a login script. If your company is using a directory services such as Novel or Active Directory, you can create a script that runs each time that a user logs in. You can use this script to open the required firewall ports.

We run into a problem, however, if the user that is logging in does not have local administrative rights on his PC. This is required to modify the settings. For this, we can employ a nice piece of freeware called CPAU. Using this tool, you can do a run-as style command to make it go. Alternatively, you can use a tool such as Admin Script Editor to compile your script into an executable that runs under a specific security account. There are other tools that can do this and feel free to add them in the comments section if you would.

Active Directory Startup Script Method

You can also run the script using Active Directory’s group policy for the machine account. This script runs under the context of the machine’s system account and does not need to be elevated by tools such as CPAU. You can do this in the Group Policy Editor under “Windows Settings => Scripts => Startup”.

The following is a script that will open the required ports on the XP firewall:

netsh firewall set portopening udp 445 WindowsNetworking enable all
netsh firewall set portopening tcp 139 WindowsNetworking enable all
netsh firewall set portopening udp 137 WindowsNetworking enable all
netsh firewall set portopening udp 138 WindowsNetworking enable all
netsh firewall set portopening tcp 5900 VNC enable all
netsh firewall set portopening tcp 5800 VNC-HTTP enable all

Group Policy Method

You can set these options using Active Directory’s Group Policy, also. You can access this in the Group Policy Editor by navigating to “Computer Configuration => Administrative Templates => Network => Network Connections => Windows Firewall”.

Extra Notes

As a side note, if you choose to use a scripting tool such as Admin Script Editor to compile your script, you can also choose to distribute it directly to the end users so that they can execute it themselves.

Make sure that you also disable Simple File Sharing on the remote computers. That can be just as much of a barrier to remote administration as the firewall. I’ll make a post about that one soon.

This has been fixed and a new release had been placed at http://www.vncscan.com/vs/download.htm