Everything but ood server's reverse proxying working for remote desktop

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1

I have been fighting to install OOD and get a working remote desktop for weeks (while the instructions for setting up OOD itself are detailed and accurate, those for setting up remote desktop seem to be a nearly nonexistent afterthought). We’ve reached the point at which I can login, fire a desktop off on a cluster node, and it successfully starts the VNC desktop session.

I can even use ssh to proxy the node’s VNC server listening port back to my desktop and open a desktop VNC viewer.

However the ‘open viewer’ option in the browsers fails instantly. The only clue I have been able to find is in the OOD server logs,

=> httpd/access_ssl.log <==
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [08/Jul/2022:16:45:16 -0700] “GET /rnode/axis1/44232/websockify HTTP/1.1” 404 196 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0”

Other than this one line, I haven’t found anything to go on, and that’s not enough for me to even begin to guess more than the obvious (something is not installed and/or not configured) and that it may be websockify. Has anyone encountered this? Or setup a fully working remote browser-vnc desktop?

2

Hi and welcome!

Yes we’re trying to revamp our documentation. I believe this is the bit that’s relevant to you

https://osc.github.io/ood-documentation/latest/app-development/interactive/setup/enable-reverse-proxy.html#steps-to-enable-in-apache

These 3 settings. Be sure uri settings are enabled and the host_regex matches what your hosts (axis1) look like.

host_regex: '[\w.-]+\.my_center\.edu'
node_uri: '/node'
rnode_uri: '/rnode'

Also - it looks like that’s not a FQDN - axis1 or it’s missing bits of your domain, so you may need the set_host configurations also described in that page.

3

I’ve followed through the proxy setup commands, and using Netcat I’ve demonstrated to myself a working proxy (ood.nic.uo/node/5555 forwards my browser request to a listening nc) and reverse proxy (/rnode/XXX causes a waiting “echo ‘hello world’ | nc -l 5555” to emit “hello world” back in my browser).

So the proxy setup works (yay) but still the browser noVNC just cries “failed to connect” (boo). I feel like Zeno… it’s so close to working it hurts.

4

Here are some additional questions.

  • Can you confirm when you use a browser that you still get these 404s?
  • Are you using a proxy, like a load balancer in front of OOD?
  • I just want to confirm when you did an NC test you used axis1 like the jobs do. Not the FQDN with a domain, just the hostname as is as you would see it in a url that OOD would generate.
5

I just checked and it is the host name that is the problem.

I opened the noVNC advanced settings and edited the host target from ‘axis1’ to ‘axis1.stor’ and it worked.

However I have

  • entered set_host (why not use hostname -f?), rerun the configuration generator and restarted httpd
  • put .stor first on the /etc/resolv.conf domain search list and restarted httpd
  • put “172.17.10.1 axis1.stor” into /etc/hosts and restarted httpd
    And none of them have any effect, the host is flat ‘axis1’ which does not work.

Ultimately following

I directly edited set_host into
/var/www/ood/apps/sys/bc_desktop/submit.yml.erb
and restarted and it works: I am able to launch a remote session and get a gnome desktop appear in my browser. Horray! There’s some other things that need to be worked out but it looks like it’s alive.

6

Glad to see you got it!

Make the changes here instead. The file above will be overwritten when you update.

/etc/ood/config/apps/bc_desktop/submit.yml.erb

7

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