581737 - Figure out why VNC sucks on Win7 Minis

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Infrastructure & Operations Graveyard :: CIDuty, task, P5)

Description

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

Connecting with Chicken of the VNC to talos-r3-win7-NNN slaves is slow, and doesn't redraw cmd windows properly. Does it work better in other peoples VNC clients ?

Comment 1

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Totally sucks for me, too. Bumping to P5, since we've got workarounds (ssh, re-connecting often).

Comment 2

[John Ford [:jhford] CET/CEST Berlin Time]

I get this using osx's screen sharing client (by running 'open vnc://address' in terminal).  I found that moving around whichever window isn't redrawing properly is a good way to force it to redraw.

Comment 3

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

I find the window waggling trick helps with CotVNC too, but really this bug is about making the VNC server not suck.

Comment 4

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

Bug 743901 comment #10 has some suggestions.

Comment 5

[Armen [:armenzg]]

Do not reply to this email. You can add comments to this bug at
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=743901

John was having trouble with the responsiveness of the slave using VNC, so I've
tried upgrading UltraVNC to 1.0.9.6.2 (from Feb 2012).
####################

The following UltraVNC changes made things bearable (and *possible*!!):

Select Task tray > UltraVNC widget (screen with eyeball) > Right click

Admin properties
Misc
unselect Remove Aero, Remove Wallpaper, Enable Blank Monitor...
select Enable Capture alpha blending
  http://forum.ultravnc.info/viewtopic.php?t=18720

Properties
select Poll Full Screen

The "Enable Capture alpha blending" is important to allow apps that use an Aero
look to draw menus correctly.  This includes Explorer, when app windows are
grouped clicking the app icon on the task bar will bring up a list of all
windows for that app.  Without this option clicked *nothing* will appear,
although if you move the mouse and click you can play "pin the tail on the
menu".

Comment 6

[John Ford [:jhford] CET/CEST Berlin Time]

This is because the VNC implementations just aren't great on modern windows.  I've used RealVNC and it works so much better than the open source ones do on >vista.  It even supports running as an at-boot service, which obviates the need for RDP.  It is a commercial product, but at some point, paying for a VNC server that actually works might be worthwhile.

http://www.realvnc.com/

Comment 7

[Mike Taylor [:bear]]

+1 to RealVNC - in my past lives I used it extensively to manage windows servers located in 1000's of restaurants over everything from dial-up modems to fast cable networks and it always just worked.

Comment 8

[Armen [:armenzg]]

Newer versions of UltraVNC have values from comment 5 as defaults.
The installations on win2008 64-bit machines and win8 are great.

Comment 9

[John O'Duinn [:joduinn] (please use "needinfo?" flag)]

hi Nick;

Now that we've switched to testing win7 on ix machines, is this still an issue?

Comment 10

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

I haven't had much call to look the newer ix boxes, but they seem much better from a 1 minute inspection. We're never going to fix the old ones now.