There are several reviews here which do an excellent job of describing the basics of VNC and how it works well. Consider them included with my vigorous agreement. I've never had a VNC crash using 3.3.9 on WinNT SP6 (we have a bunch of systems so configured.) I have seen problems with PCAnywhere, where it seems to go away just when you need it most. I suspect these problems are due to the NT architecture and I would expect to see them with VNC as well.

Free is listed as a con because oftentimes management insists on official product support, which can be a problem for Open Source software. Thankfully, for those who need a supported version there is TridiaVNC (http://www.tridiavnc.com/). The support is expensive (still less than PCAnywhere site licenses) but I bet that as a company whose core business is providing support that they do a better job then Symantec, who views support as a necessary evil.

The slowness aspect is mitigated by the spin-off VNC TightVNC (http://www.tightvnc.com/). This is useful over low bandwitch connections.

Probably the biggest problem with VNC is security. Failed password attempts are not always logged, leaving the server open to brute force attacks. The connection is not encrypted so the password can be grabbed off the network. This isn't such a big deal on internal networks, but definately not good on the Internet. I highly recommend a VPN or SSH tunnel if using VNC over the Internet.

The linux client seems to have some issues. Mine likes to core dump a lot. The Win32 client has never crashed on me.

The only issues I've seen are with some management tools used for HP storage arrays and their embedded database "SOLID". These databases crash quite frequently when VNC or PCAnywhere are in use.


Recommended: Yes