tigervnc and multiple users
Happy New Year to the list!
I use tigervnc on Stretch to provide remote access to my machine from a
variety of devices. I'm running VNC over an OpenVPN VPN but I don't
THINK that is relevant to the problem.
If I start tigervnc as the same user I log into Gnome as, I have no
problem. I find I can connect from a variety of client devices including
iDevices, Windows machines, and Android devices, and it works very well.
However, I would like to use this mechanism to also allow a friend to
access my machine remotely, the friend is a Mac user. I have no need or
desire to access the existing X session, just getting any graphical
desktop environment remotely is the goal. Sitting in front of his Mac I
can connect to my machine and log in as me and it all works. But I want
him to log in as him, not me. I believe that is going to require a
second instance of tigervnc server, especially as it is possible that in
the future we might both be accessing the machine remotely at the same
time from different places. If I try to run an additional tigervnc
server on my machine as HIS account on my machine, that fails to start
with:
$ tigervncserver
Warning: kazuki.local:1 is taken because of /tmp/.X11-unix/X1
Remove this file if there is no X server kazuki.local:1
/usr/bin/xauth: timeout in locking authority file /run/user/1000/gdm/Xauthority
/usr/bin/xauth: timeout in locking authority file /run/user/1000/gdm/Xauthority
New 'kazuki.local:2 (richard)' desktop at :2 on machine kazuki.local
Starting applications specified in /etc/X11/Xvnc-session
Log file is /home/richard/.vnc/kazuki.local:2.log
Use xtigervncviewer -SecurityTypes VncAuth,TLSVnc -passwd /home/richard/.vnc/passwd kazuki.local:2 to connect to the VNC server.
tigervncserver: Failed command '/etc/X11/Xvnc-session': 256!
=================== tail -15 /home/richard/.vnc/kazuki.local:2.log
===================
Killing Xtigervnc process ID 12775... which seems to be deadlocked. Using SIGKILL!
Xvnc TigerVNC 1.7.0 - built Apr 9 2017 14:38:13
Copyright (C) 1999-2016 TigerVNC Team and many others (see README.txt)
See http://www.tigervnc.org for information on TigerVNC.
Underlying X server release 11903000, The X.Org Foundation
Sun Dec 31 23:34:35 2017
vncext: VNC extension running!
vncext: Listening for VNC connections on all interface(s), port 5902
vncext: created VNC server for screen 0
XIO: fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server ":2"
after 173 requests (173 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
Killing Xtigervnc process ID 13234... which seems to be deadlocked.
Using SIGKILL!
======================================================================================
Starting applications specified in /etc/X11/Xvnc-session has failed.
Maybe try something simple first, e.g.,
tigervncserver -xstartup /usr/bin/xterm
I understand that the very first two lines of the above are not a
problem, just tigervnc reporting that it found the local X environment
(Gnome) running on the machine that I use when I am sitting in front of
it. But the rest doesn't look healthy...
/etc/X11/Xvnc-session contains:
#! /bin/sh
test x"$SHELL" = x"" && SHELL=/bin/bash
test x"$1" = x"" && set -- default
vncconfig -iconic &
$SHELL -l <<EOF
exec /etc/X11/Xsession "$@"
EOF
vncserver -kill $DISPLAY
Now there is no way I wrote that, so I either copied it from a webpage
somewhere or that is what the tigervnc package installs by default.
As I say this works when I run the server as me and try to log into it
as me. How can I set things up so I can log in as me, my friend can log
in as him, and not have to share passwords (which I just will not do,
come what may)?
Googling about multiuser access to tigervnc results in a lot of pages
referring to files /etc/sysconfig/ which I guess is not a Debian thing
as my box doesn't have an /etc/sysconfig directory.
Thanks
Mark
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