Cloudflare Access Application Support for ARD or VNC

Apple uses Apple Remote Desktop which is the same protocol as VNC though their implementation requires username and password. It would help us immensely to be able to support Cloudflare Access support for ARD much like RDP as more of our contract devs need access into Mac systems.

Using guacamole would not be my first choice as I’d prefer to use an Apple native protocol.

Hi Nate, good suggestion. I’ve shared this with our Cloudflare for Teams folks internally. Stay tuned!

Lol, just wait like a couple of days… Browser VNC with Zero Trust Rules

Actually, after configuring everything it doesn’t look like this VNC implementation works with ARD.

The message I get is:
The origin has unexpectedly closed the connection. Please confirm that the origin is healthy.

I have SSH configured and working on this host so I know the tunnel is working fine.

The configure is pretty basic:

ingress:

  • hostname: vnc.mydomain
    service: tcp://localhost:5900
  • hostname: ssh.mydomain
    service: ssh://localhost:22
  • service: http_status:404
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Thanks for flagging this one up - we are already looking at this specific use-case internally. OSX’s screen sharing I don’t think is pure VNC so there may be some additional work needed.

I personally wish we could get full RDP support in the same way as VNC :slight_smile:

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@nate.whistler on your OSX device you want to screen share, can you visit:

System Preferences > Sharing > Screen Sharing

Click the Computer Settings button and can you enable VNC viewers may control screen with password and set a password up? Then try again for us.

One last thing - if it isn’t enabled - try visiting Network settings for your zone and enabling WebSockets:

https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/:zone/network

This worked for me, no VNC server installed, but WebSockets required. (Try not to use a browser on the machine you are connecting to with this or you’ll go down the rabbit hole!)

Stay tuned :slightly_smiling_face:

I can’t guarantee, but RDP is on the list of development candidates.

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