HOWTO: Can I use FreeNX with Ubuntu?

[Tichondrius]

how did you get past the errors mentioned above? Same thing I'm getting.

you can manually kill all the processes and then it should work. But without suspend/resume like VNC, this is not very useful....

[dare2dreamer]

I've now tried both the ubuntu-backports and kanotix versions of freenx. While both work smashingly, I've run into one visual glitch on several machines running the server that no one seems to be able to provide any insight on fixing.

Once I log into my remote session, several of the icons are missing (and thus show up as a "broken" icon) on my ubuntu desktop. Most notably, everything in the computer menu, the desktop applet icon and the trashcan-applet icon.

Also, the human theme seems to not render properly, while several other themes work fine. I end up with blue title bars and such when I log in.

As all of these are ubuntu-specific pieces of the desktop, I'm hoping it's something that just requires a bit of tweaking to overcome.

Anyone else experiencing this? Anyone got a fix?

[hndrcks]

First off, many thanks to Jdong for his most excellent backporting work.

Forgive me, as my experience with ssh is primarily text based (OpenBSD firewalls everywhere!)

I have successfully setup sshd to run on an alternate port, say 8822; no problems with manipulating /etc/ssh/sshd_config to make that happen. However, when I run sshd on any port except 22, FreeNX fails, generally with an error that 'smells' like I don't have the proper public key. Any ideas?

It may be obvious that I am working on getting FreeNX through a firewall. There is an alternative way to do this (on the nomachine website) which involves using the ssh client forwarding capability - I recognize this is there but I'd rather have an alternate port solution if at all possible, as the nomachine method requires an account with ssh privilege on the firewall.

Thanks for any and all suggestions! I'll continue to RTFM and will post if I find an answer to my own question.

[dare2dreamer]

hndrcks, I am currently typing this on an NXsession that is running on an ssh session tunnelled through a firewall. The firewall is set up to forward port 22 to my gateway machine (a debian server). When I log in from there, I port forward my desktop's port 22 to localhost:2222 and then tell NX to connect through that.

Works like a charm:

ssh -L 2222:desktop:22 server
nxclient (to localhost, port 2222)

Hope this helps, saved my butt when I had to "leave town but keep working" recently.

[hndrcks]

Thanks for the prompt reply! You are correct, that works great.

Alas, this is the suggested method on the NoMachine website. I really would like to just run the whole business on a non-standard port. Will keep looking...

[dare2dreamer]

Well, I think I may have a solution to that as well...

A friend of mine currently has his desktop at my place, and he is more or less doing exactly what you are describing. To pull it off, we forwarded some port to his machine from my firewall (I think we ironically forwarded 3389 because it used to be a windows XP machine before we booted it in favor of Ubuntu.)

From there, we told sshd to listen on an alternate port:

from /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

# What ports, IPs and protocols we listen for
Port 22
Port 3389

In your case, you could remove the port 22 line, thereby disallowing logins completely on the standard port, but to be honest your firewall will stop it anyway if it comes from outside the lan so I wouldn't bother.

If you need a specific port, simply change 3389 to a different port. You might want to make sure it isn't in use by another common service though.

Once you make the change, you'll need to restart sshd in order for it to actually start listening to your new directives:

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

After that, you should be good to go. Just follow my previous directions, substituting 3389 (or whatever you end up using) for port 22 in the connections.

Now, all he has to do is log in with freenx/ssh to my.external.ip:3389 and he can log in. The only potential problem comes if you try to log in and forget to specify the port...you'll end up hitting wrong machine/no machine at all and make a bit of a mess of your known_hosts file.

Hope this helps.

[hndrcks]

Thanks for the suggestion. Adding the extra port to sshd_config, rather than replacing port 22, allowed it to work. When I put only one port in there that wasn't 22, then I got the failure. Go figure...

Anyway, thanks for the suggestion! Mission accomplished!

[dare2dreamer]

As I said, your firewall should stop port 22 (unless you configure it) anyway, so that isn't really a problem. Plus, you can always hit the machine on port 22 within the network.

Glad you got it working!

Now, if we can only figure out the problem with ubuntu icons and freenx

[jdong]

It could be GNOME version specific. I'll package FreeNX for Hoary soon, and we can play with that.

[jdong]

FreeNX for Hoary packaged.

There's no icon bug in Hoary, just in Warty's GNOME.