[tech] Guacamole remote desktop installed on Mussel

[David Adam]

I set up Guacamole (guac-dev.org) at https://secure.ucc.asn.au/login/ to 
provide remote desktop and shell through a Web browser. I've removed 
ajaxterm, which previously lived at that URI.

It's amazingly slick. It is set up with RDP to Maaxen (Windows) and 
Meersau (Linux), VNC to Gothamburg (OS X) and SSH to Motsugo (Linux).

Setting it up was not so slick. There's a version in Debian, but it's a 
bit old and didn't work with our SSH server. I backported the 
guacamole-server package, but the mixture of Java, Maven and CDBS was too 
much for me to do guacamole-client. That's installed in /var/lib/tomcat7/ 
as guacamole.war.

It's currently set up using "noauth", which should really be called 
session authentication, and the various connections are in 
/etc/guacamole/noauth-config.xml.

When we get Apache 2.4 on Mussel (i.e. when someone upgrades it to Debian 
8), we gain access to websockets which might improve performance a bit.

David Adam
UCC Wheel Member
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au