Accessing your Mac remotely isn't really that difficult, if it weren't for your resident IT-Department. You could simply open System Preferences / Sharing, enable ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) and check the VNC viewer checkbox. By doing so, your Mac starts listing on port 5900 and you could access it via any VNC viewer, like Chicken of the VNC (for the Mac), or RealVnc, or TightVnc (on Windows).
VNC is one of the very few - if not the only - cross platform solutions, allowing to access a Mac from a Windows box or vice versa. However, opening a server port is usually unacceptable and not tolerated by your IT folks - for a good reason, I might add.
OSXvnc to the rescue
Fortunately, there is the OSXvnc open source project, while providing only a subset of Apple's ARD, it has the nice feature, allowing the server to make the initial communication request.
Usually, you open port 5900 on the machine you would like to remotely control. That machine starts to listen for request from a vncviewer, on the predefined port. In this case, like with almost all clients, the viewer initiates the communication.
OSXvnc allows you to enter an IP address and by clicking the Add button, let the vnc server call the client (the vncviewer). Obviously, to make this work, the vncviewer would have been started in listening mode on the machine with the given IP.
Now, there is a little problem that still needs to be resolved: OSXvnc needs user interaction (clicking the add button), to make it initiate the connection. A really short shell script installed as a daemon however helps us to work around this issue.
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