[CentOS] NX and CentOS 5.5?

[Akemi Yagi]

On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/18/10 6:08 PM, Raymond Jender wrote:
>> I am pulling my hair out here folks......
>> I am running CentOS 5.5 in command line only. Reason being I am standing up an
>> IDS system on it.
>> I have installed the NX client/node and server pkgs. I have installed the NX
>> client for windows on a Vista box. When I attemtp to connect from the Vista to
>> CentOS, I get this:
>> NX> 203 NXSSH running with pid: 22080
>> NX> 285 Enabling check on switch command
>> NX> 285 Enabling skip of SSH config files
>> NX> 285 Setting the preferred NX options
>> NX> 200 Connected to address: 192.168.1.70 on port: 22
>> NX> 202 Authenticating user: nx
>> NX> 208 Using auth method: publickey
>> NX> 204 Authentication failed.
>> Now I have been googling and re-googling. Plenty of people have had the same
>> issue, but I have yet to find a solution that works for me. Funny that most of
>> the stuff I'm finding on google is 4-5 years old! I'm sure I am probably missing
>> something so simple I will puke!
>> I think I read that someone did an install and it worked right out of the box!!

> NX authenticates as the nx user via ssh keys to get an encrypted connection to
> pass the real user credentials over.  The commercial NX server always uses the
> same key as the client, but freenx (at least as packaged in epel or
> centos-testing) generates a unique key per install.  So you have to get the
> contents from /etc/nxserver/client.id_dsa.key into the client config for each
> target host.  You can do this by copying the file with winscp and importing it
> with the NX client gui  Click the 'configure', then the 'key' buttons to get to
> the right place.  Or you can use putty, cat the file to get the text on the
> screen and copy/paste it into the dialog box, replacing what is there - keeping
> the ---begin and ---end lines.

The OP asked this question on CentOS forums:

http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=28137&forum=40

I referred him to the CentOS wiki at:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/FreeNX

Then it turnes out he is using NX from Nomachine.  There are
differences between the Nomachine version and CentOS' nx/freenx as you
pointed out.

>> I'd really like to see a CentOS - NX configuration guide but couldn't find one.
>> Can someone just tell me how this should be configured....what changes do I need to
>> make and to what config files?
>
> It should come up working - but you can copy the node.conf.sample to node.conf
> and edit it and/or run /usr/bin/nxsetup again if you want to change any options.

FYI, the latest version of freenx 0.7.3-5.el5.centos installs
node.conf as a result of this bug tracker:

http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=4408

Akemi / toracat