This Vagrant setup is aimed at testing Guacamole with a Linux Desktop.

It starts a ‘server’ VM, which includes de Guacamole server, with support for its supported protocols (RDP, VNC, SSH, Telnet) together with its web Interface (clientless remote access). It runs a CentOS 7 VM on Virtualbox, provisionned with guacamole 1.2.0

The installation script displays a lot of messages during the VM provisionning, which should conclude with something like this:

Your firewall backup file /home/vagrant/guacamole-1.1.0.18-20-Nov.firewall.bkp

To manage the Guacamole GW go to http://<IP>:8080/guacamole/ or https://<IP>:8443/guacamole/

The username and password is: guacadmin

You can then test connecting to the Guacamole Web interface on http://localhost:8080/guacamole/ using the guacadmin / guacadmin login/passwd.

Then, the desktop connection should be ready to be used, to connect to the desktop of the Desktop VM. See below for the test user’s credentials.

Vagrantfile: Uses “bento/centos-7.1” Vagrant Box to set up a Centos 7 Server with :

• 10246 MB RAM
• 1 CPU
• 1 NAT adapter
• 1 Host only adapter with IP address = “192.168.88.100”
• Hostname=”GuacamoleVM”
• User/Password=vagrant/vagrant
• ssh key managed by vagrant ( to manage ssh keys uncomment the section (ssh key management) and change the path to your own key)

Based on the following script: http://pilotfiber.dl.sourceforge.net/project/guacamoleinstallscript/CentOS/guacamole-install-script.sh by Hernan Dario Nacimiento

Description : (borrowed originally from https://sourceforge.net/projects/guacamoleinstallscript/)

The script installs dependencies and configure the OS automatically for you in order to obtain the best Remote Desktop Gateway!

This Install Script works in a clean CentOS 7 installation and installs Guacamole 1.1.0 version for a local users authentication.

Task of this script:

• Install Packages Dependencies
• Download Guacamole and MySQL Connector packages
• Install Guacamole Server
• Install Guacamole Client
• Install MySQL Connector
• Configure MariaDB or MySQL
• Setting Tomcat Server
• Generates a Java KeyStore for SSL Support
• Install and Setting Nginx Proxy (SPDY enabled)
• Generates a Self-Signed Certificate for SSL Support
• Configure SELinux for Nginx Proxy
• Configure FirewallD or iptables

• Installs Tomcat from upstream binary distribution into /opt/tomcat (I used to have problems with the RPM installation… hadn’t time to investigate the details)
• Installs the MariaDB JDBC connector instead of the original MySQL one.
• …

Use vagrant ssh server to connect to the Guacamole server VM, and use sudo su - to gain root access.

Guacamole is deployed by tomcat, so look for configuration files into /opt/tomcat/.guacamole/

Logs are available inside /opt/tomcat/logs/.

For increasing debugging logs, you can do the following :

cd /opt/tomcat/.guacamole/
mv logback.xml.temp logback.xml
systemctl restart tomcat

Whenever you need to investigate guacd issues, you may use sudo journalctl -f -u guacd.

The Vagrant setup also starts a desktop Linux desktop system, to which Guacamole can connect through RDP.

It runs a Centos 8 desktop with XFCE, using xrdp + xorgxrdp.

The test user is testuser / testuser.

The test user session is started with the $HOME/startwm.sh script, which honors the default locale (if set. By default, none).

It seems that the VirtualBox extensions shouldn’t be used for this VM, as I’ve previously experienced X connection issues in previous setups, where the X session would be displayed through RDP, but the mouse and keyboard weren’t active. I suspect this may be related with the fact that in addition of xorgxrdp, the vbox extensions were also active.

Beware to vagrant-vbguest messing with this.