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VNC slow or lots of disconnects

We run VNC 4.0 on our WAN, and I connect to remote machines (500 miles away) through VPN and VNC. On some servers on our network, my vnc performance is just fine. It's tolerably fast and no disconnects. On other servers on the same network, it's either extremely slow, or drops my connection very frequently.

1- Is there a way I can troubleshoot this? If I could tell my sysadmin WHY this is happening, I'm sure he could fix it, but he has better things to do than spend all day troubleshooting vnc connectivity problems.

2- Is there a better/faster/more robust tool than VNC?

3- Any idea why some servers (one in particular), would be dropping my connection, on average, twice per minute?

masnrock

1) If anything, you should probably do a traffic analysis of your network. So use a tool like Ethereal (http://www.ethereal.com) or PRTG (http://www.paessler.com/prtg) to capture packets and analysis traffic. If something like VNC of all things is having problems, chances are that something else is as well. You'd have to have access to a monitor port on the switch or else your analysis might not turn out so good. Network person might be needed for this if you're not him/her.

2) Remote Desktop if you're running Windows Server 2003.

3) See #1. Might be storm of traffic hitting certain servers or a bad link along the way. Traffic analysis would be the way to initially check... then start looking for other issues.

SweatCoder

ASKER

I like remote desktop because of the speed, but I don't like the layered connection thing. Is there a way to configure RD so that it puts you on "the terminal", like vnc does, rather than running in a background process?

masnrock

Not that I'm aware of... but you could also try a different VNC-based product too. Like UltraVNC or TridiaVNC.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

SpartanIT

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SweatCoder

ASKER

SpartanIT, I'm trying Gencontrol now. Seems okay, but very slow. Slower than vnc. If it keeps the connection more robustly, that's a good thing, but is there a way to improve performance on this?

SpartanIT

Sorry, I've never had to tweak it. It has always worked as is. We have some sites that only have 64k connections that we use it accross, but none as far away as your 500 miles.

SweatCoder

ASKER

It's 1.5 MB/s on my side and T1 on the server's side. Anyways, I'll try this out, and if it doesn't drop me like vnc, it will be a great thing.

I'll award points in a day or two, just in case I can get add'l input.