226
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
226 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
87256 readers
3820 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Apparently requires VNC to be open to the internet
So if requires full access to your PC from the internet to have full access to your PC?
Honest question: who still uses VNC? I think it’s only relevant because it’s just kind of a safe fallback but not because it’s particularly great at anything.
The underlying protocol (RFB) is very simple to implement, and in fact some friends and I implemented both a VNC client and server as part of a project we worked on at university nearly 20 years ago.
Because of this, it's common to find it in various places, especially for interacting with systems that don't have an OS installed yet:
Most good VPS providers provide VNC access so you can set up your own OS from an ISO, use Clonezilla to clone the drive over the network, recover files if the drive gets corrupted somehow, etc. It's a built-in feature of KVM/libvirt that the providers usually expose using something like NoVNC in their control panel. The common off-the-shelf control panels (Virtualizor, SolusVM, Virtfusion, Proxmox, etc) all have it as a standard feature.
A lot of IPMI/BMC and KVM-over-IP systems use VNC too, for a similar purpose, just for physical hardware rather than VMs. The protocol being very simple makes it easy to build a simple version into an embedded system. This is also usually accessed via NoVNC in a web UI.
I've been in the cloud space so long that I'm like "vnc what the fuuuuck" while I dick about with cloudinit
I don't trust the prebuilt images that providers provide so I like installing from my own ISO.
cloud-init is useful sometimes, but I recently had an issue with Alpine's alternative implementation (tiny-init) where it was setting a root password I didn't know. It was pulling it from some sort of metadata, but there was nowhere in my provider's control panel to set the default root password. Alpine also doesn't have any documentation about how to disable tiny-init, so I had to read the code and figure it out myself (create a file called
/etc/tiny-cloud.disabledbeforeinitruns).cloud-init also can't configure LUKS encryption. I know its usefulness is limited on a VM (since the provider can snapshot the memory and retrieve the encryption key that way), but it's still useful when the VM isn't running or if you stop using that provider to ensure they can't recover the data, and it's required in some cases (eg Plaid required me to certify that all data is encrypted at-rest before they gave me access to their API)
If its not on-prem assume the CIA can read it.
These aren't systems for secrets, its for boring business software so I just don't care.
It’s built into every Mac
https://support.apple.com/en-us/103229#%3A%7E%3Atext=Sharing%2C+Printer+Discovery-%2C5900%2C-TCP
I know, but I’ve never seen anyone use it. People use rustdesk or something like that anymore.
I use it for a headless Mac mini, otherwise yeah better solutions exist
Vnc actually works great on Mac’s. Every other device I’ve tried it on? Awful, painfully slow. But whatever Apple has done to make it not a slow POS makes it just as good as RDP or other alternatives.