[CentOS] Secret incantations for virt-viewer?

Tue Dec 30 14:46:27 UTC 2014
Bill Gee <bgee at campercaver.net>

Hello everyone -

I am trying to use virt-viewer to connect to KVM virtual machines running on a 
CentOS7 host.  It works great when running directly on the host, but I have 
not been able to figure out the magic connection string to make it work from 
another computer.

On the host, I set selinux to "permissive" and stopped the firewalld service.  
No change, so it is not related to them.

Almost every command I try gives an immediate dialog box that says "Unable to 
connect to libvirt with URI ...".  The only command line that gets me anything 
different is this:

virt-viewer --connect xen+ssh://root@practice7.billgee.local/ 
dd2a2ba7-707d-42b5-8c83-94b11ce6e269 

This will ask me for the root password on the host machine and then gives me 
the same "Unable to connect" message.  I tried it with a regular user account 
instead of root and got the same result.

I have tried it with and without the "root@" string.  I tried using both the 
UUID and the domain name of the guest.  I tried all of the following 
protocols:

ssh://
qemu://
qemu:///
xen://
xen+ssh://
qemu_ssh://
qemu+ssh://

If I open a regular ssh shell using the +X parameter and then launch virt-
viewer, it works.  The connection string in that case is

--connect=qemu:///system

Any suggestions?

Thanks - Bill Gee