I recently came across a behaviour of Leopard's Screen Sharing feature that surprised me. Would someone with two Macs to hand please try this and let me know whether it's just something to do with my setup. (I install a lot of shit.)
- On the first Mac, log in as an administrator and create a standard user account and set its password.
- Turn off fast user switching, not that it seems to make a difference either way.
- Ensure the administrator account has a password set as well.
- In the Sharing preferences pane, go to Screen Sharing and set the option to restrict it to specified accounts. Add only the new standard account.
- Log out of the administrator account and stay at the login window.
- On the second Mac, open a Finder window and find the first Mac in the sidebar's Shared group.
- Share the first Mac's screen and you'll see the login window. Try entering the administrator's account details and the attempt should be rejected. Break the connection.
- Physically go back to the first Mac and log into the administrator account.
- Go back to the second Mac and try to share the screen. Enter the administrator account's credentials again. They should once more be rejected.
- Now for the curious part. Enter the standard account's credentials. When I do this, the remote Mac allows me to log in, but I arrive at the account that's already running: the administrator account.
This happens regardless of whether Fast User Switching is enabled. With that feature enabled, I expected to arrive at the standard account's desktop. With it disabled, I wasn't sure what to expect. Certainly not to arrive at the administrator's desktop, but I'm unsure if this is expected behaviour for VNC. I can't imagine why it would be, but I had only used third-party VNC clients (on Windows) prior to this.
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