The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, and it’s that time again for the Spring VNCScan Site License Give-Away contest! 

Rules

• Create a blog post, twitter update, or other website status telling us how VNCScan helps you accomplish network management tasks or how it could be improved to help you work more effectively.
• The post needs to have a link back to http://www.bozteck.com/vncscan or reference @VNCScan on Twitter
• Comment on this blog post or email contest@bozteck.com with the location of your status update
• Each contestant can enter a new post to win as many times as you’d like.  The more entries, the greater your odds of winning!

Reward

• On June 1, 2011, all respondents will be placed into a random pool and the lucky winner will receive a free Site License and 4 years of free upgrades for their entire organization!
• If you already have a valid license, the Site License will take effect on the day that your current upgrade period expires.

Note: Please only post on websites or social networking accounts that you control.  Posting to third party discussion forums will not count as an entry.

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Introduction

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.

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The latest release of VNCScan (2011.3.27) has started the move from the old UltraVNC msrc4plugin_noreg.dsm encryption plugin to the newer and more supported SecureVNCPlugin.dsm.

The main reason for this move was the lack of 64 bit support in the old plugin as well as its requirement for a manually generated RC4 encryption key to be shared at both ends of the connection.

VNCScan has historically done a pretty good job at making this seamless for our users but it’s a lot of extra work around code that can finally see it’s sunset.

What this means for you

If you are currently using VNCScan to deploy UltraVNC with encryption enabled, chances are you’re using the old msrc4 type of encryption.  To take advantage of the new higher security, you will need to edit the deployment profile that you used when deploying it the first time or create a new one from scratch.  You will, then, need to deploy that new profile to the computers who you want to secure.

Here, I will walk you through creating a brand new profile and deploying it to a computer.

Step 1 – Create the profile

1. Launch the profile editor

2. Create a new profile

3. Give the profile a name and a password.  Make sure that UltraVNC is selected

4. Choose the SecureVNC encryption plugin.  Make sure that the checkbox is set for Encryption

5. Save the profile then close out of the profile selector

6. Select the computers that you want to deploy this profile to, then choose “Deploy to selected” from the dropdown menu

7. Make sure that your new profile is selected in the deployment window and that you have supplied an Administrator level username and password on the remote systems.  Press Go to complete the deployment

Once the deployment has completed, you should be able to connect to the remote computers and see the following in the title bar of the viewer:

Troubleshooting

It is worth pointing out how VNCScan tells the vncviewer.exe to use the encryption plugin while connecting because that is typically the thing that trips people up from time to time.

When the deployment tool is completed, it locates the computer in VNCScan and sets some properties for it that can be viewed by right-clicking the computer (in VNCScan) and choosing “Computer Properties”.

The most important settings for this to work right are shown below.

As you can see, these must match the settings for the deployment profile that you used when deploying.  Eventually the MSRC4 plugin will completely go away so you will want to do this to all of your computers soon.

Please leave comments and suggestions for these changes below.

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We’re thinking about adding the ability to lock down certain portions of the application in a password protected “Limited” mode that is very much like the Parental controls in Windows.

The default mode would be full rights.  You would set it into “Limited Mode” in the program preferences and set the password there also.

Is this something that you would find useful?

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In the latest build of VNCScan, we needed to roll back to the previous UltraVNC 1.0.8 server and viewer.  According to our friends at UltraVNC, there is a pretty serious bug in the latest version of their server.   You can read about it here.

While they are working feverishly to fix the bug, we’ve decided to release an update to VNCScan to deploys and uses the previous stable release of UltraVNC. 

If you have already deployed the UltraVNC 1.0.9 and are experiencing problems, you can fix them by installing this 2011.3.15 update of VNCScan Console, then re-deploy UltraVNC to those desktops.

Download: VNCScan 2011.3.15.exe

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After some conversations between Spiceworks and Bozteck, we have decided to create a vendor page on their website for the Spiceheads that are also users of our VNCScan product.

We think that Spiceworks is a great companion for VNCScan in the IT Professionals toolbox.  With both of our products utilized on your network, you get the best network inventory and helpdesk tool as well as the most full featured network management console for under $60. 

If you have a spare moment, head over to our vendor page and click “Follow”.

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VNCScan version 2011.3.14 has been uploaded.  You can get it here.

This is mainly a bug fix version but there were also some behind-the-scenes structures added that will make way for some upcoming feature releases.  We’re excited about what’s coming down the line!  More to come soon …

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Update: The latest releases of VNCScan no longer require this work around for CTRL + ALT + DEL (SUPER).  It is supported natively.

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UltraVNC has had some pretty big issues with sending the CTRL + ALT + DEL combination to Windows 7 when UAC (User Access Control) is turned off (or on in some cases).  We have heard from many users that sending this sequence has no effect on the remote computer.

To date, the developers at UltraVNC have not released a fixed version for this.  We’re impatient around here so we decided to create our own working fix and release it in VNCScan Enterprise Network Manager version 2010.9.21.

The updated deployment tool adjusts settings on the remote system during deployment to fix this issue.  This means that if you ever toggle UAC on the remote system for any reason, you will need to re-deploy UltraVNC to it using the deployment tool in VNCScan.  For most people, this is a “set it and forget it” feature in Windows so.

You may also need to deploy again if you have deployed UltraVNC in the past with previous versions of VNCScan or if you installed UltraVNC manually.  Those previous versions do not have knowledge of this work around and the settings were not toggled.

If you do turn UAC on or off after you have deployed UltraVNC to the computer, you will need to first reboot the desktop, then deploy UltraVNC to it again using the deployment tool inside VNCScan.

While this is an exciting development for users of VNCScan, I know that this isn’t the best fix in the world.  It’s the best that we can do until the great developers at UltraVNC release an officially patched release of their server software.

Steps for changing UAC on a computer

1. Turn on or off UAC using the control panel applet
2. Deploy UltraVNC to the computer
3. Reboot the computer

You can download the latest release here.

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Overview

I just wanted to put up a quick blog post to share a cool new way that I’ve found to share VNCScan data among multiple computers.  Dropbox.com is an online storage service.  Their free accounts give you 2GB of disk space.  They have a great Windows desktop client that mounts that storage under your “My Documents\My Dropbox” in Windows Explorer.

Any data written to that folder is synchronized with the online storage; which is then synchronized on any other computer that has the client installed.

As with any big change, test this out in a lab environment before committing to this in a live scenario.

How It’s Done

1. Sign up for a free account at http://www.dropbox.com

2. Download and install the dropbox tool for Windows https://www.dropbox.com/install

3. Copy your “My Documents\VNCScan” folder to the Dropbox folder (usually "My Documents\MyDropbox")

4. Open VNCScan

5. Click Preferences in the toolbar

6. Choose “Support Files”

7. Change the location of the VNCScan data to the new location of the VNCScan folder

8. Choose NO to the prompt to move the data (you’ve already copied it)

9. Choose OK

10. Close VNCScan, then open it again

* Do steps all steps except for #3 on each computer that you want to share the same data with.

Key Points

• This solution is free
• This solution requires the latest version of VNCScan to function properly
• Each computer must log onto dropbox using the same username/password
• The dropbox folder location should be the same on each computer
• We’ve only tested this with up to 10 computers. If you’re using more, back up often.  Let us know your level of success in the comments!
• You may want to go into the Dropbox client preferences and turn off notifications. They can get annoying really fast.

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We get many requests for command line options that can be used with the UltraVNC viewer that is shipped as the default in VNCScan.  You can find all of them right here.

You can use these command line options to take advantage of features that are not settable via the GUI in VNCScan.  Here’s how:

1. Open the main program preferences from the toolbar
2. Select the “Support Files” section
3. Add your command lines in the textbox designated for the switches

You can get your own copy of VNCScan at http://www.bozteck.com/vncscan

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