VNC setup on WindowsXP Guest in VirtualBox - Gentoo Headless server

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Messugga

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Hey guys,

So I have a headless server running Gentoo, and on it, I have a WindowsXP VM.
Now, with Windows Remote Desktop Connection being what it is (Sucking over WIFI), I want to give VNC a bash, as that worked alright for me in the past.
The problem is, I'm not sure how to set everything up. With RDP, I just connection to my server's IP, 192.168.0.5, and that automatically hooks me up with the XP VM, but with VNC I get "unable to connect to host: Connection refused (10061) which seems to mean that the connection wasn't allowed to be initialized, nevermind letting the authentication process execute.
So what am I doing wrong?
 
VNC connection refused means that the connection was made, but then terminated at the client side. You have to either accept the connection, or configure the listener on the XP machine.

WRT to RDP; it should be quicker than VNC. Have you reduced the colours and desktop size? I have never seen VNC to be quicker than RDP....
 
Conradl said:
VNC connection refused means that the connection was made, but then terminated at the client side. You have to either accept the connection, or configure the listener on the XP machine.

WRT to RDP; it should be quicker than VNC. Have you reduced the colours and desktop size? I have never seen VNC to be quicker than RDP....
Click to expand...

It's running on 15bit colour, and 800x600 purely because 640x480 is just TOO small.
It's acceptable over the lan, but if I switch to Wifi, it becomes pretty much unusable. Maybe it's just a limitation of the technology. :o
 
Messugga said:
It's running on 15bit colour, and 800x600 purely because 640x480 is just TOO small.
It's acceptable over the lan, but if I switch to Wifi, it becomes pretty much unusable. Maybe it's just a limitation of the technology. :o
Click to expand...

I'm guessing its your MTU (Maximum Transfer Unit) settings.
 
Last edited:
Messugga said:
It's running on 15bit colour, and 800x600 purely because 640x480 is just TOO small.
It's acceptable over the lan, but if I switch to Wifi, it becomes pretty much unusable. Maybe it's just a limitation of the technology. :o
Click to expand...

RDP is not as good as ICA, but it is not bad either. What are your ping times to the machine? Anything under 200ms is usable, for any remote access system. You generally need around 20kbps for each RDP session (lowest settings), with around 5kbps for each increase in either resolution or colour depth.

Also make sure that you have bitmap caching on, and everything else turned off on your client settings.....
 
Average latency is 2ms, with a maximum of 5ms, so it's definitely not that.
Under experience, all that is ticked now is Persistant Bitmap Caching, which sped things up a tad but it's still not really usable over the wifi.
I see that MTU settings can cause some issues, often time-out related, but I have no idea where to tinker with these.
 
What VM software are you using?
Are you using NAT/bridge networking for the guest?
 
Have you configured a port on the host to forward to the VNC port on the guest?
In the virtual machine xml file under <ExtraData>.

The following forwards host port 21 to guest port 22

<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/Protocol" value="TCP"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/GuestPort" value="22"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/HostPort" value="21"/>
Click to expand...
 
Random717 said:
Have you configured a port on the host to forward to the VNC port on the guest?
In the virtual machine xml file under <ExtraData>.

The following forwards host port 21 to guest port 22
Click to expand...

I'll have a look into that. Thanks for the tip!
 
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