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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Adobe Flash Player has been the target of many security attacks lately due to its inherent security flaws.  Adobe updates the Flash player frequently. 

It’s very difficult to get all of the systems on your network updated because it requires Administrator permissions to apply the updates.  There aren’t any inexpensive tools for pushing these updates out so I will show you how to do this using Bozteck VNCScan.

Here are the steps in a nutshell:

1. Download the flash player distribution from here
2. Create the script in the Script Manager
3. Add the flash install file to the script window
4. Ensure that you have access permissions to the remote computer(s)
5. Select the computers that you’d like to deploy the script to
6. Select the script from the dropdown
7. Watch it work

Downloading Flash Player

You can download the scriptable Flash player from http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/fp_distribution3.html.  For this tutorial, we’re going to download the Internet Explorer executable.

Create the script

Open the script manager using the Tools => "Scripts and Commands” menu as shown below:

From the window below, choose “New Script”

In the new script window,enter the script title and optionally a folder to group it in as well as any notes on the deployment and then choose to include a file.

Browse to the install_flash_player_10_active_x.exe file that you downloaded to choose it.  You will see the path to the file below:

When the script is executed on the remote computer, the path to the included file will be %systemdrive%\temp\vncscan\install_flash_player_10_active_x.exe.  Any files that you attach to script this way are always stored there.  You’ll need to reference that location by using that in the path of the file that you’re calling.  See the screen shot below:

%systemdrive%\temp\vncscan\\install_flash_player_10_active_x.exe /silent

Choose “Save and Close” to return back to the main window.

Deploy the script

We need to start by ensuring that the administrative access to the remote computer has been set.  One way to do this on a per-computer basis is to right-click the computer and choose properties; and then flip to the “Windows Login” tab.  Enter the Administrator username and password that is valid on the remote computer.  If you’re not on a domain, just leave the domain field at %HOST%.

Now, select the computer in the Managed List.  Now, click on the “Remote Scripts” and choose your new script.

The window below will pop up and the software will be deployed:

Keeping Up to Date

You can keep this script up to date easily because Adobe always names the file the same every time.  Simply return to the website and download the latest version, remove the one in the script, and then add this new download.  Simply re-deploy and you’re up to date!

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