Question

Why does our VNC connection no longer work?

Posted on July 31, 2018
Ubuntu 16.04 Getting Started
Asked by Pete Dixon

I set up our new other Digital Ocean account up for VNC and had it working but now we can no longer connect using VNC. Simple SSH connecting to the droplet is fine. If it matters my boss and I were accessing the droplet from two different cities.

The error we are getting is “VNC connection failed: Too many authentication failures”.

Is this related to us not setting up a SSH key when we set up the droplet?

I find it odd it was working then suddenly stopped. After I set it up for the Gnome Desktop I had had 4-5 successful logins and I had thought the problem was solved.

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jarland

DigitalOcean Employee

• July 31, 2018

Accepted Answer

Hello friend!

VNC will protect itself against login attacks and prevent login after too many failed attempts. There are people out there who are scanning IP ranges for open VNC ports and then trying to brute force log in to them in order to gain control over your server. I found some advice on that here:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/321372/vnc-too-many-authentication-failures

Kind Regards, Jarland