[CentOS] NX and CentOS 5.5?

Sun Sep 19 15:56:23 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

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.

> 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.

> ssh (putty and WinSCP) works just fine for me in case you need to know.
> If you need any particular information, please let me know.

These connect directly as the user - for NX, you need an nx user that should 
have been installed by the package.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com