TightVNC Port Number Gotcha

TightVNC is great if you want to remote-control someone else's PC without resorting to MS' Remote Desktop solution.

Something that cost me about an hour's worth of frustration, though, is their way of specifying an alternative to the standard port (5900):

You either

1. specify an alternate screen number (a small integer, e.g. 5 means screen 5 means port 5905); or


2. explicitly specify an alternate port, e.g. 5905 .

Alternative 1 is selected with a colon between the host address and the screen number, e.g.

66.66.66.66:5

To specify an alternate port, you need to insert two colons:

66.66.66.66::5905

Because colons are just tiny freckles on the screen, especially in proportional fonts, this is easy to overlook in the documentation. Many other utilities (and URLs) use single colons before a port number, so habit has us do the wrong thing by default.