Thanks Nick,

I'm giving it a try. Any tips you could share regarding:
- Screen resize with browser.
- Audio
- Keyboard layout
- Firewall rules (weirdly enough, I can't make it work enabling
3389/tcp, only completely disabling the firewall makes it work. Still
investigating..)

Regards,
CI.-

El dom, 22 ago 2021 a las 15:08, Nick Couchman (<[email protected]>) escribió:
>
> On Sun, Aug 22, 2021 at 12:21 PM Ciro Iriarte <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Hello!,
>>
>> I'm working on a lab environment for coworkers & given the requirements are 
>> GUI Jumphosts & no licenses for OS  we settled on Linux+VNC & Loadbalancing 
>> pools with Guacamole.
>>
>> All the OS users will be named, authenticated to FreeIPA and potentially a 
>> NFS based $HOME. Guacamole also authenticating with LDAP+OTP and JDBC-stored 
>> connections.
>>
>> I've struggled setting up VNC with openSUSE 15.3 and their KDE desktop 
>> (SDDM). Have a slightly better outcome with XDM (uglier but works somehow). 
>> The desktops/jumphosts are running as PVE VMs, so also tested with KVM/QEMU 
>> VNC support. The experience with that case is way better, rock solid VNC 
>> session, even manual screen resize works, there's one annoying bit (keyboard 
>> mapping for es-latam) and a major roadblock: it's the VM console, user2 
>> could land on the already logged in session for user1.
>>
>
> Yes, here you have run up against one of the chief drawbacks of VNC - lack of 
> session management.
>
>>
>> I imagine I could create the loadbalancing group with 1 connection per user 
>> with session "stickiness" & then setup OS level timeouts to lock the GUI 
>> session after no activity. That & fixing the keyboard mapping with 
>> guacamole-> QEMU VNC console would make it, but feels like having a lot of 
>> moving parts.
>>
>
> Yeah, if you're going to go this route, you're essentially going to have to 
> rely upon Guacamole to manage the sessions, which means not load balancing 
> groups and session stickiness, but also logouts. I would say that you need to 
> log out as soon as Guacamole disconnects, not just lock, because you could 
> still run into the same scenario.
>
>>
>> Any smarter approach to this?. Could anybody share their recipe for similar 
>> scenarios?.
>>
>
> In personal experience, where I need access to Linux systems remotely, I tend 
> toward xrdp instead of VNC. While xrdp is certainly far from a perfect RDP 
> server implementation, it does feature TLS encryption, some basic session 
> management (disconnect/reconnect and multi-user access to a single system), 
> and there's even a native Xorg xrdp driver that I generally use that avoids 
> having to go through the pain of setting up VNC to back xrdp (which was the 
> way it was originally deployed).
>
> You'll still have to rely upon some of Guacamole's features to manage 
> sessions - particularly if you want to load balance and split to multiple 
> hosts, Guacamole's load balancing and session stickiness will still be 
> required to help handle those things. And, if you go that route, you'll still 
> have some challenges with users getting disconnected from one host and then 
> logged on to a different host, where their session will essentially be "lost" 
> (even if it's still running). xrdp does not have any inter-server 
> communications mechanisms (that I know of, anyway) that would help with this, 
> so it really would rely on Guacamole to handle that part of session 
> management.
>
> Hope this helps - I'm not saying this is the "right" way to do it, just how 
> I've settled on remote, graphical access to Linux systems over the past 
> couple of years, and it works well for me.
>
> -Nick



-- 
Ciro Iriarte
http://iriarte.it
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