Thanks for the reply. I suppose I should really bite the bullet one of these days and mess around with nxclient. But due to the pre-holiday work crunch these couple of weeks, I'll have to live with those clones for now.

On 1/28/10, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:

On 1/27/2010 11:36 AM, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:

...

I've been scratching my head over this one after setting up VNC on another existing server. Followed the instructions here http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/VNC-Server as usual. It worked initially. However since this server is going to be installed in a rather inconvenient place and having done pretty stupid things before, I decided for the first time to try the portion that says

# Add the following line to ensure you always have an xterm available. ( while true ; do xterm ; done )&

So that I don't inevitably do something like kill kde and find myself unable to do anything.

The problem now is, for some reason, I get 4 xterm window after restarting (or stop/start) vncserver. The symptoms now are

1. Consistently, of the four xterms window, #3 and #4 can be closed.

#1 and #2 will resurrect themselves.

*** Removing the while loop from /home/user/.vnc/xstartup does not change this.

2. if I comment out this line in /home/user/.vnc/xstartup exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

I will not get this problem. At least there will only be one xterm window in what I think is the primitive twm desktop.

3. If I then uncomment the xinitrc line, I get back 4 xterms window

after restarting vncserver. It's like KDE is somehow insisting on running that while loop even after I've deleted it from the xstartup file.

How do I fix this? Admittedly I could simply minimize the two xterm windows and/or switch virtual desktop and ignore them. but obviously something is wrong and it makes me uncomfortable.

Everything is 5.3 standard, I've not touched the default X11 config nor xinitrc. Except I did do an yum update to current.

I'm not sure about this specific issue, but I'd highly recommend using freenx instead of vncserver anywhere that it is possible to run nxclient or the NX client (windows/mac/linux) from www.nomachine.com on the client side. Performance is much better and the sessions start on demand with the option to suspend or not when you disconnect.

-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Hi,

Freenx is packaged, so there is nothing to installing it. The only thing remotely time-consuming is getting the unique key it puts in /etc/nxserver/client.id_dsa.key on the server side into the client, which you can do in the GUI configuration

I guess you are right on that account. I got it yum installed and the nxclient in Windows up in less than 5 minutes. It's been half an hour since I tried to log in. Copied the users public dsa and imported it, didn't work. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling with options to ensure I was using the default nomachine key which hopefully the windows client is setup with by default, didn't work. Although there was some error about passwd being unsafe and using -f. Googling around didn't turn up much useful information except some other folks were having the same problem without resolution.

Finally tried copy and pasting the key through vnc, didn't work either.

So I'm giving up for now. The answer's probably in documentation somewhere but I've been going through tons of documentation/readme/faqs/KB for work with more to digest that I just don't have the energy to spend on something unessential for now.

Thanks anyway for the suggestion, will try again when I am more free.

Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:

Hi,

...

Freenx is packaged, so there is nothing to installing it. The only thing remotely time-consuming is getting the unique key it puts in /etc/nxserver/client.id_dsa.key on the server side into the client, which you can do in the GUI configuration

I guess you are right on that account. I got it yum installed and the nxclient in Windows up in less than 5 minutes. It's been half an hour since I tried to log in. Copied the users public dsa and imported it, didn't work. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling with options to ensure I was using the default nomachine key which hopefully the windows client is setup with by default, didn't work. Although there was some error about passwd being unsafe and using -f. Googling around didn't turn up much useful information except some other folks were having the same problem without resolution.

Finally tried copy and pasting the key through vnc, didn't work either.

So I'm giving up for now. The answer's probably in documentation somewhere but I've been going through tons of documentation/readme/faqs/KB for work with more to digest that I just don't have the energy to spend on something unessential for now.

Thanks anyway for the suggestion, will try again when I am more free.

I don't remember having to change anything from defaults. I usually use putty to ssh in initially and copy/paste the key contents into the NX config. Note that you aren't using the user's own key, but the one in /etc/nxserver/client.id_dsa.key. The software does an initial login as the 'nx' user, using that session to encrypt the session as the real user logs in with a password. And if you leave the default (don't check the 'Disable encryption of all traffic') everything runs over the port 22 ssh connection. But, I've always used gnome sessions. It might be different if you use KDE.

Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:

Just an update, finally got some spare time to try doing this again.

Nothing better than a clean install right?

So I yum remove nx freenx and reinstalled it.

Then following the wiki instructions, I proceeded to cp the conf file... only to discover, there is no conf file. Although I distinctively remember seeing them in my last attempt.

There should be an /etc/nxserver/node.conf.sample that you can copy to node.conf if you want to change some defaults. But it should work with the defaults.

Repeated the uninstall install process again, still no conf file.

So next I tried downloading the .rpm from Nomachine just in case for some reason those in repos was missing the conf file by some accident. That made me realize that the Nomachine versions had 3 files, nxclient, nxnode and nxserver, but the Centos version seems to be missing nxnode?

$ rpm -q --whatprovides /usr/bin/nxnode freenx-0.7.3-2.el5.centos

On some of my machines I have only: freenx-0.7.3-2.el5.centos nx-3.3.0-14.el5.centos and some also have nxclient-3.3.0-6 but it is not necessary.

Nevertheless, after downloading and I installed the nxclient since nomachine says it contains tools used by nxnode which in turn contains tools used by nxserver. However when I got to nxserver, it failed with errors that the nx user already exist. After userdel nx, doing rpm erase and install of the package seem to work.

But i still have no conf file, and obviously freenx client still doesn't connect.

That's not 'obvious' because it should work with defaults. What do you see in the detail after the error? The only things that might keep you from connecting are not permitting both key and password authentication on ssh and not having the key for the nx user (from /etc/nxserver/client.id_dsa.key) installed in the client. Maybe you need to: service freenx-server start I've forgotten if it starts by default.