Wondering how to fix VNC ‘Timed out waiting for the response from the host computer’? We can help you.

Often Windows user’s come across this error while trying to connect to the computer with a VNC viewer.

Here at Bobcares, we get requests from our customers to fix similar issues as a part of Server Management Services.

Today let’s see how our Support Engineers fix this issue for our customers.

What causes VNC ‘Timed out waiting for the response from the host computer’ error?

A typical time out waiting for response error on VNC looks like the one given below:

One of the most common causes for this issue is that no response was received from the specified IP address, even to reject the connection.

Steps to fix this error

Following are the steps that our support techs follow to fix this VNC issue.

1. Firstly, we have to check whether the host server is up and online.

We can check this using the following ping and telnet commands:

ping [IP_address]
telnet [IP_address] [port]

2. Then we have to ensure that the antivirus software lists have VNC Server as an exception.

3.  We must also ensure that the default port (5900) that VNC uses is open in our firewall.

With the following command we can check this:

telnet [IP_address] 5900

If it is not connecting, either the port is closed in the server, or our source IP address may be blocked in the server.

We can open port 5900 with the following commands:

sudo /sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -p TCP --dport 5900 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables save

Also, check whether there is any block for our IP address.

4. After that, we need to check whether we can establish a direct connection over the Internet.

5. Finally we can try restarting the VNC server using the following command:

sudo service vncserver restart

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Conclusion

In short, we saw the steps that our Support Engineers follow to fix VNC ‘Timed out waiting for the response from the host computer’ error for our customers.