Archive for September 7th, 2010
How To: Fix TightVNC After Moving
While I don’t use VNC to log into my home PC very often, it is a nice convenience to have if I want to check something on my home PC while I’m at work or out of town. I recently moved to a new apartment and upon getting my PC set up (before the furniture, naturally), I saw that TightVNC no longer seemed to be working. I tried a few simple fixes, but with no pressing reasons to use VNC, I put off setting it up.
Last night, I become determined to fix it for no apparent reason. After trying to disable the Windows firewall (which I promptly put back up), I got frustrated again. I considered that maybe I was missing something simple, so I asked a tech-savvy friend* if he could think of anything. This morning he got back to me suggesting that my router might be blocking the ports that need to be accessed. I knew this was wrong because 1) I did that when I set up AndroidVNC, and 2) I had checked it after the problem arose. His advice did, however, make me realize that I had not tried taking the router out of the equation to make sure it wasn’t the culprit.
To test whether my VNC server was working or not (since I had to unplug my wireless router), I used GoToMyVNC. Without the router, I was able to get a connection on GoToMyVNC. Clearly, the router was the culprit. I decided to simply retrace my steps through the VNC set up I outlined on my blog for AndroidVNC (see above) to see if something had changed with the move. Turns out, my local IP address (on the router) had changed by 1. I corrected this and now I’m back in business.
I wanted to post this mostly to show that, for the first time, blogging has helped me by having steps to retrace without having to redo the research for a simple project.
*Thanks, Nigel
