More Adventures In *** RHEL Configuration

I know I shouldn’t have blogged on Saturday - as soon as I think I have a problem fixed the universe rises up and slaps me roundly about the head.  So fast forward to the end, it’s Sunday night and I’m installing Connections on RHEL 7 so that’s good.  However to get there I had more hurdles which I’ll note here both for myself and for anyone else

I configured and enabled VNC and SSH for access which worked fine on the same network but not from any other network (“Connection Refused”).  The obvious first guess is that the firewall on the server hasn’t been disabled.  It’s always the first thing I do since I have perimeter firewalls between networks and I don’t like to use OS ones. So Saturday and Saturday night was an adventure in checking, double checking and checking again that I had the firewall disabled.  RHEL 7 has replaced iptables with firewalld but iptables still exists so my worry was that I had something enabled somewhere.  I didn’t think it could be my perimeter firewall since I had built the server with the same ip as an earlier server that already worked. My other guess was VNC being accidentally configured with -nolisten but that wasn’t true either.

By the time I went to bed Sunday morning I had ruled out it being the OS and was going to start fresh a few hours later.  I’d also noticed that although I could connect via VNC it was slow as hell despite having a ton of resources.

Sunday morning I decided to delete all the entries referring to that server’s ip on our Sonicwall perimeter device and recreate them.  That fixed the network access. The one thing I didn’t build from scratch was the one thing that was broken. *sigh*.

At this point I did consider switching to Windows 2016 on a new box but I already planned to use that for another server component and wanted to build with mixed OS. Also #stubborn.

So now I have VNC and SSH access but the GUI is awful. I can’t click on most of the menus and it keeps dropping out.  I’m running GNOME 3 and I can find endless posts about problems with GNOME 3 and Cent OS or Redhat so I bite the bullet and install KDE because all I want is a GUI.  KDE is as bad, slow, menus not clickable.  I make sure SELINUX is set to “Disabled” but still no luck.   I try installing NoMachine as an alternative method but that has the same problem with the GUI - slow, unresponding, menus unclickable and eventually a crash with “Oh no!, Something has gone wrong”.  Which isn’t nearly as entertaining the 100th time you see it.  Along the way I disable IPV6 entirely and found and fixed this bug

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=912892

and this one

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=730378

oh and this irritating setting

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/195833 “Authentication is required” prompt

Throughout Sunday I’m continually working with /etc/systemd/system/vncserver@:1.0 to modify the settings, create new instances, create new VNC users but no matter what I try it proves unworkable.

I’m using the Red Hat instructions from here which has a configurator you can use to automatically create the file vncserver@ file according to your settings.  I’m suspicious of that file because it has settings I don’t normally use like  -RANDR so eventually I edit the file and change

ExecStart=/sbin/runuser -l turtlevnc -c \”/usr/bin/vncserver %i -extension RANDR -geometry 1024×768\”
PIDFile=~turtlevnc/.vnc/%H%i.pid

To

ExecStart=/sbin/runuser -l turtlevnc -c “/usr/bin/vncserver %i -geometry 1024×768”
PIDFile=~turtlevnc/.vnc/%H%i.pid
Cleared the /tmp/X11.unix/X? directories and restart once more.  Everything including GNOME 3 works and it’s zippy zippy fast.

 

So. Note to self. Next time remove that RANDR setting and win yourself an entire day back.

 

Installation Manager Install Fails on Redhat 6.6

Starting a new Connections customer build this weekend I ran into a problem at step 1 - installing Installation Manager. I could install the console version using ./installc but the graphical version would bring up the product selection screen then crash before the license screen with a “JVM Terminated =1”.

After trying various things, new versions of java, using root instead of sudo (a known problem with earlier versions of IIM) I found the technote I needed.  This is a problem caused by a very specific combination of packages

RH6.5 or 6.6

GTK > 2.24

Cairo <1.9.4

Amazing I didn’t catch that right?  To tell what versions you have installed run

rpm -q gtk

rpm -q cairo

If your cairo version is out of date (which mine was) go to ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/sourceforge/f/fu/fuduntu-el/el6/current/TESTING/RPMS and download the latest version of cairo (in my case cairo-1.10.2-3.el6.x86_64.rpm)

then run rpm -U cairo-1.10.2.-3.el6.x86_64 .  Now IIM will run and install fine using ./install

Full details of the technote are here