So, I have everything working the way I thought it should with my Rocky 9.2 VMs and decided to take the plunge and upgrade my desktop to R9.3. Went to reboot and the system never came back due to a hardware problem on the motherboard. The rest of that saga is a story for a different forum but the important thing is that my usual access to my systems was gone for about a week with me using an old laptop with 6GB of ram and a dual core AMD CPU instead. I got several thermal shutdowns before I learned not to push the poor little thing. That specifically meant not opening up my usual set of VNC sessions for fear of starting a fire.
Finally got in a replacement desktop, installed Rocky 9.3, did the perfunctory update and then proceeded to get things back the way I wanted them. That went fine until today when I decided the next thing to do was get VNC working again. I keep getting an Error 111/Connection refused when I connected to another system also at Rocky 9.3. I checked and double checked settings; turned off both firewalld and SELinux and kept getting the same connection refused error.
TigerVNC isn’t really good at logging what’s going on so I finally decided to try running vncserver from the command line. It works perfectly on both the real hardware and a VM when run from the command line. These instances both had both given “connection refused/111” errors. The VM that I originally connected to when I got my desktop back still had the VNC session that I had running when I rebooted my desktop. I logged out of a similar session on the VM that then wouldn’t let me back in so starting a new session has something to do with the problem. Nmap shows the VNC port (5901 for me) as “5901/tcp closed vnc-1” when firewalld is running which matches the behavior I’m seeing and doesn’t sound right. As noted above, I’ve tried stopping firewalld and still get the connection refused error so I’d go with the port isn’t being opened by vncserver when started by systemd but don’t know why.
Other than adding myself as a user the vncserver.users everything is “out of the box” so no changes to the installed VNC config files or the systemd files (still haven’t found them).