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Use AppleScript to interact with remote Mac users
Authored by: leenoble_uk on Sep 30, '03 12:26:41PM

I followed this article last week and reached the point about VNC and decided to have a go at that part.
I installed the recommended software but it failed to work how I would have liked. I traced the problem down to the fact you have to be an administrator user to use the VNC server, and I didn't want to leave my machine logged in as admin 24/7. In order to aid anyone who gets stuck at this point like I did here's what you need to do to be able to manipulate the screen of a non-admin user. BTW this isn't going to be subtle, they will see what you're doing so it's not suitable for mischief.

Install OSXvnc where it is launchable by an admin user.

~adminuser/Applications/OSXvnc

Log in to your non-admin account which you want to access remotely. This next part you can actually do via ssh (provided you've configured OSXvnc to serve on startup) from another machine so you can actually get the server running from another location if you forgot to leave it running...

SU up to your admin account...

su adminuser

... and enter the password when required.

type this...

sudo -b "Users/adminuser/Applications/OSXvnc.app/Contents/MacOS/osxvnv"

and again, your password when requested.

The VNC server will now launch and if you've configured it to start the server whenever it's started up you should be able to access your desktop using Chicken of the VNC. So anytime you want to access your desktop graphically you've only got to ssh in as an admin user and type one line to get your VNC server going.



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