When you’re kickstarting ARD/Screen Sharing, you might notice times when you are asked if you want to connect to the local logged in user or to a new session, which shows the login window. In most cases, I want to connect to the console user, or that locally logged in user. To go right there, instead of seeing the OS X login window, you can use the defaults command to write a VNCAlwaysStartOnConsole key (boolean, true) into com.apple.RemoteManagement.plist in /Library/Preferences, as follows:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteManagement VNCAlwaysStartOnConsole -bool true
The newer features here are pretty cool and really nice to have, but I’ve now added this to a lot of my imaging workflows as it more mirrors the intent of admins.
