How to change the default screen sharing / VNC port number on Mac OS X?

Question

Is there any way to change it from the default 5900 to some other port?

Doug Harris · Answer 1 · 2010-06-02 18:06:51Z

This has been discussed on various forums at apple.com and on macosxhints.com. The short answer is "you can't change it".

The longer answers suggest ways around it -- three possibilities:

Use alternate VNC server software
Use an ssh tunnel to redirect traffic from your custom port to 5900
Configure port mapping in your router to take incoming traffic on a different port to go to port 5900 on your mac.

Just for the sake of completeness: some suggest that changing the ports in /etc/Services might do the trick. I tried that (I even rebooted my Mac after changing it) to no avail. And giving it some more thought, it might even be a bad idea to mess with that file, as other applications might also use it to get the well-known port number if they want to connect to some third-party using a specific protocol. (Like: changing the SSH port in that file might seem to work but is a bad idea.)

naveen · Answer 2 · 2011-11-04 01:25:07Z

up vote 0 down vote

atleast disable connections from everything except localhost to 5900 http://docs.cslabs.clarkson.edu/wiki/Securing_OS_X_with_ipfw

answered Nov 4 '11 at 1:25

Can you explain a bit more please? – slhck Nov 4 '11 at 11:06

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