Workstation 6.x & VNC

[Pieter-Jan_de_V]

I'm running Workstation 6.x on a Windows Vista 64-bits machine and try to connect to a Windows XP guest from another PC in my LAN using UltraVNC, but I keep getting "Failed to connect to server!" messages from the VNC Viewer. I disabled the firewalls on the Workstation host and guest and on the machine I'm trying to connect from, but that doesn't help.

Does anybody have suggestions what might be wrong and how to solve it?

[jgl1975]

Are you using bridged networking or NAT ?

Try with bridged and it should work.

If you're using NAT, you'll have to configure the port forwarding rules for VNC on the VMware router.

[Pieter-Jan_de_V]

Thanx for the swift reply. Unfortunately I'm already using bridged networking, so that's not the solution. Any other suggestions?

[jgl1975]

Have you activated VNC ?

This is done by doing this :

in the guest; go to VM > Settings > Options > Remote Display > Enable remote display

[Pieter-Jan_de_V]

Yes, have done that. In fact I have four different VM's with a different VNC port assigned to each of them (5900 - 5903). I tried to make a VNC connection to a Windows XP guest and to an Ubuntu guest, both with the same negative result :-(. Any more suggestions?

[jgl1975]

Are the vmware tools installed in your guests ?

[Pieter-Jan_de_V]

Yes they are. Interesting question though, because I didn't know that it's required to be able to use VNC. Please keep the suggestions coming.

[jgl1975]

I'm running out of options here

[Linjo]

Can you even ping the machine from the outside? If you can you can try to do a portscan to see what ports are answering and not.

(Using nmap or something similar)

/ lindjo

[jgl1975]

Back to basics ;-).

Good idea Linjo. I'm getting too complicated

[Pieter-Jan_de_V]

Yes I can ping ping the VM's. Later today I'll try a portscan and get back to you guys.

[rsa911]

are you sure no firewall is running the guest, blocking incoming VNC connections ?

from a remote machine try to "TELNET Guest_IP VNC_port" if you don't get any prompt, either a firewall is blocking the connection or simply VNC is not listening on this port on the guest !

on the guest, assuming it's a windows machine: use "netstat -a" and check a process is listening on the port you used to perform the telnet

also make sure it's listening on either 0.0.0.0 OR on the guest IP, NOT on 127.0.0.1 (loopback ip not reachable from the outside)

[admin]

The built-in VNC server is a service on the host, not the guest. You don't need Tools installed in the guest, and it doesn't matter what type of network connection the guest has since the VNC client connects to the host.

[Pieter-Jan_de_V]

etung's reply put me on the right track. Upto now, I tried to connect to the VM directly. Thanks to etungs reply, I connected to the host, using the guest's VNC port number and that works.

Thanks for all the help, but in the end it seems I made a stupid mistake myself. Probably not enough RTFM. You're welcome to shoot me

[Mats_Webjörn]

Hi,

I've got exactly the same problem as described above. My setup is:

- XP SP-3 running VMware host 6.0.3 with bridged networking

- Win2k client with VNC enabled at port 5900. Log-file lists: "MKS REMOTE started VNC server, listening at: 5900"

- "VMware Workstation WMX" added to XP host filewall exceptions.

- When I try to connect with RealVnc 4.1.2 Viewer from either the XP host or another XP on the same subnet then I get "unable to connect to host: Connection refused(10061)"

Has anyone succeeded with a similar setup?

[Tomes]

I had the exact same problem.

A few other things to note:

• Under Edit > Virtual Network Editor in Workstation I had to enable the Connect a host virtual adapter to this network for the private network in question, so that my host could ping my guest machine.
• I also was using VNC to the incorrect address... I finally changed it to use the LOCAL hosts IP (gateway assigned by the previous step, in this case 10.10.2.1), and then use VNC to connect to "10.10.2.1:0"

Once you get passed that silliness, it works great!