Guacamole 0.3.0 on Ubuntu 10.04

From Linuxintro
Revision as of 09:30, 26 June 2011 by imported>ThorstenStaerk (just verified this is indeed a solution that works through company firewalls)

Guacamole is a program to tunnel a Linux desktop to a browser.

Sometimes in your Linux life, you need to control your servers in the internet with a graphical user interface. The problem is when you are behind a corporate firewall blocking ssh requests to the public internet. Typical corporate firewalls only allow proxified client access to port 80 and 443 in the public internet. The solution is to use a browser to display a Linux desktop. The solution is not, however, to use VNC for a web browser, as it will be blocked by corporate firewalls. The solution is guacamole.

Here is what I did to configure Guacamole on 2011-06-25 using a rackspace server with Ubuntu 10.04 x64:

apt-get install tomcat6 libvncserver0
tar xvzf guacamole-0.3.0-ubuntu-10.04-x86-64.tar.gz
cd guacamole-0.3.0-ubuntu-10.04-x86-64
dpkg -i *.deb
  • put the software to the right place
ln -s /var/lib/guacamole/guacamole.war /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps
ln -s /etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties /var/lib/tomcat6/common/classes
  • edit /etc/guacamole/user-mapping.xml
<user-mapping>
   <authorize username="user" password="password">
      <protocol>vnc</protocol>
         <param name="hostname">localhost</param>
         <param name="port">5901</param>
         <param name="password">passwort</param>
    </authorize>
</user-mapping>
This will allow you to log in as user named user with the password password.
  • install a vnc server
apt-get install tightvncserver
  • start the vnc server
vncserver
  • Now that this has worked, you want the service to be reachable via port 80, so do a port forwarding:
ssh username@server -L localport:remoteserver:remoteport

See also


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