History of VNC2Me

How did VNC2Me come to be, why did you build it ?

VNC2Me came about for several reasons.

First and foremost was that a good "opensource" package that did almost exactly the same as VNC2Me just silently closed its source, without explanation or reason, and they started commercially selling their product. This annoyed us to no end, as they had promoted it to everyone as open source, then closed without changing names, or even notification or anything. then we discovered that they had removed all the source from sourceforge.net ... this is the creators right, but it annoyed us to the point we decided to create our own.
I (aka JDaus) had created JDsVNC (with HEAPS of help from Budg) which was a simply a way to tunnel UVNC SC to my Linux box, allowing me to support friends and family securely. this project proved very successful and handy, but it was hard to keep updating the ssh host keys, server addresses and several other things that just annoyed me, so I felt it was time for a redesign ...
My own need (in a previous job) to be able to use (and have others use) JDsVNC from any location (whether in the office or at home or a clients site) and dial into a clients site (without having the need or ability to modify port forwarding on remote routers.

After much searching, pulling my hair out and crying in the corner, I eventually pieced together a system that required much work to get setup on remote sites. this involved installing UVNC server, UVNC repeater and SSH tunnelling services on a "server" machine onsite (the server was often just a workstation that was left online 24/7) and setting up each part of that ... this took time to setup each part, having the server allow local connection, the repeater in a certain mode, and the SSH tunnelling application create a remote tunnel (on a pre-defined port).

After it was all setup, I was eventually able to connect to our ssh server (in the DMZ) open a Remote tunnel (with to connect to the same port that the site SSH was listening on, and connect to the site server (or any other workstation with UVNC setup on it) via the repeater.

As you can see, this was a pain to setup and maintain, I also found issues with sites dropping offline (the SSH tunnelling application just stopped responding, it was still running, and saying connected, but nothing coming out ...

It was at this time that I thought of creating a project to do all of what I needed, and ssh2me was born (eventually to be renamed to vnc2me with a few other names in between).

I would like to see other developers pickup on the ideas I have placed here, and make as many compatible applications as possible, but for now I am the only creator.

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