Enable VNC Remote Desktop on Fedora 12

This is a quick write up that hopefully will save someone the time I wasted trying to figure this out.

Enabling Remote Desktop access on Fedora 12 (Gnome) is very easy as stated in the manual. Go to System->Preferences->Remote Desktop and enable it there by just checking a few check boxes.

My goal was to connect from a Win box so you need to download a VNC Viewer client such as TightVNC.

Easy, breezy up to this point but when I tried to connect to my server I'd get an error message: 'Failed to connect to the server'.

After some online research I bumped into a first possible cause. VNC connects on port 5900 so I needed to make sure that I was targeting that port. And yes, the VNC client points there by default.

A second indicator was a permissions block (server, client or router) and that's where the issue was. So to solve the problem, here's what I did:
- Go to System->Administration->Firewall
- Click on 'Other Ports'
- Then 'Add' the port 5900 TCP vnc-server
- Click on 'Apply'

Drop me a comment if this helped you solve your issue.