I noticed that when Centos 5 came out this started happening, I assumed at some point it would be fixed... i thought maybe it was a bug (and that maybe rhel 5 worked fine)... but 5.3 still has this... so I'm wondering what's going on....

I know how to set up vncserver, been doing it for many years, the problem is that when it is set to run at startup, it does run, has a pid and everything but you just can't connect. you have to kill it and then re-run it (doing this via ssh) and then it works.

it makes no sense really, i tried other ports, shutting down the firewall, enabled extra runlevels, all without any luck. SE Linux is disabled.

it's not that big of deal i guess, if i disable the service and just manually start vncserver every time it works fine, but i'm one of those people who like to make things work (like they used to in centos 4)... also i was going to set my dad up with a server running centos and it would be nice if he just had to click once to connect via vnc.

so i'm wondering if anyone has encountered this problem... can't seem to find anything specific to this anywhere on google, even though i tried a few things, nothing has worked... which is why i'm posting here, hoping somebody has came across this problem and could help me out.

at what level can you not connect? What does the server log say?

btw, vnc is horrible, especially when it's run on boot. Why not try something decent like NX instead?

I cannot connect on any level, it's like the daemon is running but not accepting connections or something... stalled out perhaps...?

could be that it's running without anybody logged in (which never mattered before), because if i ssh in as root and kill it and re-run it it works fine...

it's trying to launch the service like 'service vncserver start' on boot... perhaps the startup script needs to be changed to just './vncserver'?

i've used realvnc for as long as i can remember, and it works just fine for me (besides this one issue), i have no reason to change...not to mention it's built into rhel/centos... nice and easy to setup / update...

on any level? So you've telnetted into the port and it's not connected, and netstat doesn't show it as listening on 5901 or whatever?

yeah 5901 doesn't show up on netstat... telnet fails too

oddly enough (after i kill screen 1 and run vncserver from ssh) it still doesn't show up in netstat, but telnet gives a response....

right, so you need to check the log file for that instance as a starter. Also check the actual command that's running from ps -ef.