ARD and VNC no longer connect to 2 out of 3 servers. Please help.

Question

We have 3 Mac OSX servers here - Web, DB, File. Recently, I attempted to connect via TightVNC - I only had a PC with me at the time. After setting the Mac servers to accept VNC connections (with a password), I was able to connect with TightVNC. ARD was still working fine as usual on the Mac.
Last week, both the VNC and ARD connections started failing on the Web and File servers. The DB server works fine with both though. All of the remote and VNC settings on all 3 servers are the same, and like I said, everything was working fine. I also tried Chicken of the VNC from my Mac, but I get the same results (cannot connect).
The ARD icons for the web and file servers are greyed out in ARD now. When I try to connect to them, I just get the message " Connection failed to (server name.)" The current status for both of these servers is "unknown." I can ping both of them though.
Any ideas on why this would be working, then stop? Would a reboot fix this?
What stumps me most is that the DB server connection is still working, even though all 3 of these servers are set up the same and were working without a problem.
Thanks for any help!
Message was edited by: jimvii
Message was edited by: jimvii
Message was edited by: jimvii
Message was edited by: jimvii
Message was edited by: jimvii

Answer 1

I have found that reverse DNS entries, especially when they are wrong, can really mess things up. If you haven't already, in your ARD scanner windows, right-click and add the "DNS Name" column, and adjust the columns so you can see it. Whenever you have problems connecting in ARD, that's always a quick thing you can check. If the DNS name does not match your computer name, you'll have problems.
I don't think you gave enough detail of what is and isn't working, but in general, you can try connecting both with dns names and IP addresses, and connecting to Macs sometimes works better by putting their name as macname.local instead of macname.yourdomain.com.
If you try to connect with VNC via IP address, and the IP addresses on your servers are static (should be), and it doesn't work, it very likely could be a firewall setting. Even if you have the firewall off or ports open, you'll want to run a port scan against the server in question to test what truly is open.
This is all general stuff. Post something more specific if none of this helps (detail of OS versions, programs used, ports set open, any error messages, etc).
Good luck