Off the record - Craig Box

A long time ago I built an installer for WinVNC so that IT Partners' clients can connect back to us and we can fix their problems remotely.

A problem I have always had with it was that you have to launch WinVNC seperately from a connection shortcut; if you tried to run it every time, it would say "Another instance of WinVNC is already running", and if you go to connect when there isn't a running WinVNC, you get "No existing instance of WinVNC could be contacted". Therefore, users need to perform two distinct steps - a "launch", which does -kill -run, and a "start session", which does a -connect.

Here is a nice batch file to get around it, using SysInternals' PSList utility. If you know your users are on Windows XP or greater, you could use the built in tasklist command instead.

@echo off
pslist winvnc > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% EQU 0 goto connect
start winvnc -run

:connect
if [%1] NEQ [] start winvnc %1 %2 %3 %4 %5

:end

Tags: programming, sysadmin, windows

This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 10:38 am and is filed under Technical, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.