How can I hide the WinVNC tray icon?

Assuming that your users are on windows PCs, change the following
registry value:

In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3,
"DisableTrayIcon"=dword:00000001

This "registry hack" only works on some flavors of VNC servers,
but not all: TightVNC is supported, RealVNC is not. See here for
the whole list of (Xref) Flavors of VNC and VNC Add-on's.
http://faq.gotomyvnc.com/fom-serve/cache/3.html

Thanks to Nick Palmer for the contribution!

An alternative and more drastic measure to prevent the VNC
icon from appearing in the system tray is to modify the
a registry entry specific to Windows itself. Making a mistake
in here could prevent Windows from ever working correctly again,
so please beware.

If VNC is running as a service, you can remove its service helper
key from the Windows registry. That is, via regedit, remove the
"WinVNC" value which can be found in one of these:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
or
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
or
HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Again, this is very risky. But it should work.

The third method of "hiding" the VNC tray icon requires some
developers tools: using a resource editor, modify the WinVNC
icon so that it will show the same icon both before and after
a client is connected.

Thanks to Michael Roland for the contribution!

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http://www.tightvnc.com/faq.html#hideicon


TightVNC Frequently Asked Questions

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Important Note

This page is under construction. To get more information about TightVNC, please consider visiting the VNC FAQ (most of the infomation there is applicable to TightVNC as well).
Contents

* How would I connect from the Internet to a machine in the internal network which is behind a router?
* What is the default password in TightVNC?
* How secure is TightVNC?
* How can I hide the system tray icon in WinVNC?
* Do you plan to port TightVNC to MacOS X?

How would I connect from the Internet to a machine in the internal network which is behind a router?

You should enable "port forwarding" in your router's configuration. Port forwarding allows passing external connections to computers in the internal network. Almost all routers support this type of redirection.

For example, to access VNC or TightVNC server running on default ports, a router can be configured such way that TCP connections to ports 5900 and 5800 would be passed to the same ports of a particular machine with a specified private IP address (typically 192.168.x.x).

Here is an example of configuring port forwarding, assuming that TightVNC Server is running on default ports 5900 and 5800, on the machine with IP 192.168.1.100:

Application | Start port | End port | Protocol | IP Address | Enable
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
TightVNC | 5900 | 5900 | TCP | 192.168.1.100 | yes
TightVNC | 5800 | 5800 | TCP | 192.168.1.100 | yes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

When port forwarding is set up, you can connect to the router's IP address such way as if it was your target machine's IP address, but you should specify those port numbers on which port forwarding was activated.

See also:

* www.portforward.com (help on setting up port forwarding on various routers and firewalls)

What is the default password in TightVNC?

There is no a hardcoded default password -- that would be too insecure to have one. The "default password" in TightVNC refers to the password used when there is no user logged in (and WinVNC is being run as a system service). To change the default password, choose TightVNC\Administration\Show Default Settings, in the Start\Programs menu.
How secure is TightVNC?

Although TightVNC encrypts VNC passwords sent over the net, the rest of the traffic is sent as is, unencrypted (for password encryption, VNC uses a DES-encrypted challenge-response scheme, where the password is limited by 8 characters, and the effective DES key length is 56 bits). So using TightVNC over the Internet can be a security risk. To solve this problem, we plan to work on built-in encryption in future versions of TightVNC.

In the mean time, if you need real security, we recommend installing OpenSSH, and using SSH tunneling for all TightVNC connections from untrusted networks.
How can I hide the system tray icon in WinVNC?

Win32 TightVNC includes code from TridiaVNC distributions, and therefore it should include Tridia's modification to disable the tray icon. Here is a quote from TridiaVNC 1.3.3 announce:

* Added registry flag to cleanly disable the tray icon on all platforms and in all modes without affecting other settings. The default is "0" and indicates that the tray icon should not be disabled. A value of "1" will suppress the tray icon for all users.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3\DisableTrayIcon DWORD "0"
HKLM\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3\DisableTrayIcon DWORD "1"

Thus, to disable the tray icon, you should start the "regedit" utility from the command line, go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ORL\WinVNC3\ folder, and create a DWORD parameter with the name "DisableTrayIcon" and the value "1". Then, after restarting WinVNC, the icon will not be shown anymore.

But please note that hiding the icon is usually not a good idea. For example, if you want to restrict users from changing the server Properties, it might be better to use the AllowProperties setting. For more information, see the description of "AllowProperties", "AllowShutdown" and "AllowEditClients" options in the VNC documentation.
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WinVNC hide: Hide running WinVNC server
http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/winvnc/

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How to install VNC via a remote command prompt on a Windows 2000 computer
http://guh.nu/projects/vnc/

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Frequently Asked Questions
http://www.darkage.co.uk/faq/index.htm

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