Arch Linux

Harey

Member

From: Bavaria, Germany

Registered: 2007-03-24

Posts: 374

Virtualbox Remote Access

Hello everybody,

I am trying to provide some virtualbox headless workstations to my users working from home office. The virtualbox-ext-oracle extension is installed and the access via RDP is working. But I was wondering if there is a way to provide a faster access protocol, i.e. vnc. I installed virtualbox-ext-vnc but I can't find anything how to configure the access via vnc. The virtualbox documentation is rather thin to non-existent and I have to configure everything via remote console and 'vboxmanage'.

I also tried to get some vnc server on the virtual boxes (all running archlinux as guest) working, but gnome/gdm is not really helpful in this matter. The wiki pages concerning x11vnc and tigervnc seem to be outdated, the systemd services there don't work.

Gnome-Boxes seems not to work too as it wants to store its password in a non-existent keyring. Don't know for sure but this seems to be related to the ldap user login on the virtual machines.

Which is the easiest way to go? Should I just stay with rdp? Is vnc worth the hassle? Which vnc solution do you consider best?

The remote user should first 'see' the gdm login and then -after login via ldap- his gnome environment.

Greetings
Harvey

Edit: I managed to get vnc access to gdm via

runuser -u gdm -- x11vnc -reopen -noxdamage -many -display :0 -auth /run/user/120/gdm/Xauthority -forever -bg

and to my user later on via

su my_user

and then

x11vnc -reopen -noxdamage -many -display :1 -auth /run/user/1000/gdm/Xauthority -forever -bg

But I can't figure out how to do this automatically on login

Last edited by Harey (2021-12-12 20:22:57)

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