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Encoding the VNC password with VNCENC

Warning!

Please note that this document only applies to WinVNC 3 and it's varients. The passwors produced by VncEnc do not work on RealVNC 4 or higher.

Overview

VncEnc allows you to encode a password for the machine.ini file from the command line. This allows you to make rapid changes to machine.ini quickly and easily.

Requirements

Download a copy of VncEnc by Mauro Castaldi
(Mauro's email is k astaldi at hotmail com without the spacing and the dots in the right places <w>).

Steps

  1. Download the tool and save it in a folder.

  2. Drop into a DOS shell and CD into the folder you download VncEnc into.

  3. Type VncEnc, put a space and then enter the password you want to encode. Now press enter.

  4. VncEnc will now show you the encrypted form of that passphrase. (Tip: Right click the CMD titlebar and choose EDIT and then MARK. Now highlight the text to copy and press ENTER when you're ready. Well done, you've just used DOS clipboard <w>).

  5. Copy the results and paste them into machine.ini. This file lives in the folder called "common".

Example

Here I've specified that VncEnc will encrypt the word "password". (Obviously this is a bad choice, but this is only a demo).

D:\Downloads>vncenc.exe password

\registry\machine\software\orl\winvnc3\default
    Password = REG_BINARY 0x00000008 0xfd3cd8db 0x58147a72

Now I can copy the text into machine.ini or if I wanted to be clever I could pipe the results into a text file using: 

D:\Downloads>vncenc.exe password > d:\fastpush\password.ini

Update: 10th October 2003

Sysworksoft have released a tool called VNCPWD that can reset a VNC password remotely. This works more elegantly than using PSEXEC and VNCENC. Full instructions and the program can be found on their website.