JDPFu.com 2024

Configuration and Setup

Purge nano
Install openssh-server
Purge unity-lens-* unity-scope-* geoclue-ubuntu-geoip compiz – remove tracking and prevent “GUI cheese” from getting in the way of VM performance.
visudo – for my settings.

Haven’t updated anything yet – get the current IP, decide on a static one and tell ansible to do the rest in a few minutes.

Current DHCP IP – 192.168.1.249
Future static IP – 192.168.1.61

Running a remote desktop using VNC/KVM/virt-manager … er … sucks. This has been an issue with virt-manager and VNC since the beginning. It still is.

Push my ssh keys to the machine, login … feels good. Setup a quick ansible set of tasks for a desktop …. and let her go.
Ansible got stuck …. installing some server packages.

Quickly modify the /etc/network/interfaces file manually with the static IP and

• Reboot.
• Login – after trying to contact the VM over the network with ssh, ping, … arp … can’t find it. Hummmm
• Back to the console then login and now I’m staring at a black screen.
  Ask the VM to shutdown nicely. Nadda.
  Destroy the VM. Done. Restart it.
  Login window is displayed and it is time to search for the box on the subnet.
• nmap -sT 192.168.1.100/24
  didn’t find anything … on the login screen – before logging in, there is a Connection Information option which returned “No valid active connections found!” – nice. Can’t do anything remotely OR locally.

So I give up and login … Error: window-stack-bridge
From there, I switch to a different console – alt-2, login and get to work. First, check on the network connection. My interfaces file changes are there, but the interface was not brought up – ah – user error. I had left off the “auto eth0” part inside the interfaces file. Restart networking – working perfectly now.

Restart the ansible script … step away for a few minutes.

When that completed, I had a desktop with my preferred stuff on it, configured to be part of my network – using my DNS, my NTP, and other infrastructure.

Of Spice and Men

I even got a wild hair somewhere and decided to re-try spice on this VM. After a few false starts, downloaded a new spice client and remembered to reset the localhost-only listener … to listen on public interfaces and was able to connect. I think that last part was the issue with all prior attempts, see, I never actually run a desktop on the same hardware where the VMs run. It didnt work though virt-manager, but always through remote-viewer.com from a Windows client. Also worked from a Linux client a few minutes later – spicec. Went back to a few older VMs and made connections with those too – 12.04, 13.10 all worked, with video streaming much better than expected AND audio worked. The connections are not encrypted and only happen over the LAN, so I dont know if this can replace my FreeNX setup. … yet. A few more weeks of testing from home will be needed too.

Some keys are ignored on the keyboard through spice, so it definitely need tweaking. No quotes – single or double so far. Also, the keyboard input is grabbed and held in a way that is not clear to me yet, so switching between the host windows and remote-viewing desktop is not 100% seamless. It is good, but not seamless.

The tricks to getting spice working are in the virt-manager settings:

• select the VM
• Add new hardware – graphics
• Display/Video – default is VNC – change that to spice- be certain to check the all interfaces checkbox.
• It should prompt to add spice channels – yes
• remove the prior VNC video
• change the video card model from cirrus to qxl – this only works for spice on Linux client VMs. Under Windows, there is a device driver that must be loaded first, I understand.
• Restart the VM.
• Lookup the port used for the VM you wish to connect with – something in the 590x range. I checked the process table for the VM-Name and it was in the KVM-spice command arguments. This is un-encrypted, so do not use it over the internet without a VPN.
  That is it for the server-side.

On the client – remote-viewing – side, we just need the spice client. That is either spicec on Linux/UNIX systems – the other dependencies should be pulled in. On Windows, there is an installed available from the main spice project website. Be certain to get the x32 or x64 package as needed. Install it … though it is not really an installer.

On the client, I created a script/batch file to make starting the connection easier.

start c:\Users\{my-username}\AppData\Local\virt-viewer\bin\remote-viewer.com spice://qbe:5903

Again, change the port to match what you discovered above. When it connected, a full desktop was displayed with slightly odd resolution. Use xrandr or lxrandr or arandr or whatever tool you like to change the resolution from inside the display.

Almost everything behaves fairly snappy. When switching into the display from another local window, sometimes there is a 1-2 second lag as the channels get going again, but after that, it is FAST.

I hope this helps someone.

So, that is the extent of my testing on that new VM. Seems like every other Ubuntu release, except at the GUI … which I replace.

Anyone else have Spice working well?
Have you tried Ubuntu 13.10 yet?