FreeNX Server and Ubuntu 11.10

Do you also have a matching set op SSH keys setup for nx?

Where the public key is on the nxserver system and the private key is in every client?

ssh-keygen can be used to generate such a pair.

Thanks for the reply. When I installed NXServer I chose the option to use the preloaded nx ones. Do I need to do something else?

Can anyone help?

Is the user account known on your host system?
Can you show the details from a login?

I would consider it a security risk to just allow anybody access through the default keys, so I always generated my own.

if you mean the ubuntu box, yes there is only the one user account.
You will have to more specific I'm afraid, show details?
This only on my private LAN and it's a trial so I'm not worried about security at this point in time.

If you connect the details of why a connection failed are "hidden" and only shown when you push a "details" button.

I meant that because I didn;t go for defaults i have no experience with out of the box work, just with a generated keypair.
Anyway the keypair is available on the server, you can lift the private key from there and paste it in your connection profile.
(and see if they are equal too BTW).

The details button is greyed out on my client box:


I can see no way of configuring keypair settings in a connection profile where do I look for that?:-

It is behind the Key button in the 3rd screenshot. [ General Tab ].

There you need the private key part of the keypair on the server.

(if you use ssh-keygen you get a privatekey.. privatekey.pub )
On the server you have an ~nx/.ssh/authorize_keys2
Containing all public keys, the private key needs to be pasted into the nx config...
~nx is short for the home directory from the nx user.

Am I thick or what! Thanks I'll get back to you.

Hmm

On the server there doesn't seem to be a folder .ssh and the .nx folder is empty:-

On your workstation in then ~/.nx folder [ /home/user/.nx ] the connection profiles are stored. [ if you hit the save button on the nxclient software ]/

To verify nx setup on the system where the nxserver runs do:
   ssh into your server  
   sudo -s   # if not logged on as root ]
   cd ~nx/.ssh
   ls -la

Alternatively use:
   ssh into your server
   sudo -u nx -s
   ls -la # should show a .ssh directory
   cd .ssh
   ls -la # should show the same as the last command in the previous set.


It should not be empty as at least the default public key should be stored there.

Thanks. It seems that Windows 7 has two separate folders:-

%userprofile%\\.nx
%userprofile%\.ssh

The key on the windows client is the same as the key in "client.id_dsa.key" in:-

/var/lib/nxserver/home/default/keys

On the Ubuntu box running NXServer.

Is this correct?

Yes, client.id_dsa is the private key,  that needs to be distributed to all nxclient.

The public key should be in  /var/lib/nxserver/home/.ssh/authorized_keys2
[ derived from client.id_dsa.pub ].

So on my windows box, the key in the config of the client needs to be the same as the key in:-

/var/lib/nxserver/home/.ssh/authorized_keys2

no..
The key consists of an assymmetric key pair: the public part is different from the private part, but they can only be used together.
The public key part of the key is in the authorized_keys2 file, the private part should be in the nxclient profile.
If the private part of the default key is in the client.id_dsa.key file on your server.


After the session state is final the Details button should become "un-greyed".
IF it just dissappears you may need to examine the logs on the server:

grep -i nx /var/log/*

And see if something about some obvious mistakes are mentioned.
If no sufficient info can be found, you can turn on "debug" logging by updating the
/usr/nx/etc/server.cfg

And set:
SessionLogLevel = "7"

Reconnect and verify the logs again.

Details button remains greyed out after the the authorisation failure:-

Link to screen shot above

grep -i nx /var/log/*

does not return any results that relate to NXServer. Just results from "/var/log/udev" and "/var/log/Xorg.0.log.old" for "LNXSYSTM:"

"/usr/nx/etc/" does not exist on my Ubuntu box and doing a search for "server.cfg" returns nothing

Any thoughts?

I am not sure where your server.cfg file  for nx is.
That's the one you need to edit for getting more info.

It might be  in /var/lib/nxserver/...?
or in /etc/nx...?

My setup on Gentoo is in /usr/NX/... [ with the whole original nx shebang in there ].

When I do a search across the whole file system from / there appears to be no "server.cfg".

Well the nxserver does need a config file to startup...

If find doesn't yield anything, try to run the nxserver --update command.
That should at least show where the server.cfg is.

I get:-

NX> 100 NXSERVER - Version 3.2.0-74-SVN OS (GPL, using backend: 3.5.0)
NX> 500 Error: Function --update not implemented yet.
NX> 999 Bye

Did this mean anything to you?

Maybe I have installed the wrong version then. I though I had installed the free version. Will have to look into this.

It's taken me a while to get back to this but it's sorted now. Thanks for the help.