How can I change the default port of Remote Desktop (VNC)?

Question

Let's say I went to:

 System > Preferences > Remote Desktop

And enable Remote Desktop. Now let's say I have another machine on the network that is also running a VNC server. I want to VNC into my network from the outside, but I need each VNC server to be running on different ports.

How can I change Ubuntu's default port for Remote Desktop/VNC?

Answer 1

Using a little information from the dated Dave's Tech Blog, you can adjust the port setting by going into gconf-editor.

Under desktop > gnome > remote access there is a key that says alternative_port and is set to 5900. Just change the value to what you need. Then enable the key use_alternative_port.

The other option is if your router/firewall support uPnp you can adjust Vino to make the adjustment in the same section of gconf-editor.

• Reference: How do I use the gconf editor?

Answer 2

You can also do this from the command line.
For example, to use port 5555, you would use these two commands:

gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/use_alternative_port true
gconftool-2 --set --type=int /desktop/gnome/remote_access/alternative_port 5555

Note, if you follow the schema docs, the port should be in the 5000 - 50000 range:

[the alternative_port key is set to] the port which the server will listen to if the 'use_alternative_port' key is set to true. Valid values are in the range from 5000 to 50000.