November 2015 – pikedom.com

Installing Ansible on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Take a look at the official installation guide. The simplest way to install Ansible on Ubuntu is add the PPA repository and install via apt-get.

If not already installed, you will need the software-properties-common package.

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

Then add the repository and install ansible.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ansible

Presumably you’ve already got an external server that you want to configure with Ansible. You will need SSH access, and if you’ve not already done so, you’re gonna want to setup key-based authentication. Assuming you’ve done that, you can test things are working with:

su -
mv -v /etc/ansible/hosts{,.original}
echo 134.213.48.162 > /etc/ansible/hosts
exit

I also need to tell ansible to connect as the root user.

sudo mkdir /etc/ansible/group_vars
sudo vim /etc/ansible/group_vars/all

Enter the following. The three dashes at the top indicate this is a yaml file.

--- ansible_ssh_user: root

You should now be able to test with the following.

ansible -m ping all

You should see output similar to the below if all went well.

andy@bastion:~$ ansible -m ping all 134.213.48.162 | success >> { "changed": false, "ping": "pong" }

X2Go on Ubuntu Server 14.04

In a previous post, I talked about my experience using X2Go with XFCE4 and Lubuntu.

Here is how it was achieved…..

On the Server

Here I’m using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS but you can install X2Go on just about any Linux distro.

Create a User Account

Create a regular user to run the desktop session under.

sudo useradd -m -s /bin/bash andrew
sudo passwd andrew

For your own sanity, I recommend you setup password-less key-based authentication as soon as possible……go, do it now!

Configure SSH

Open the main configuration file for the OpenSSH daemon process.

sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Ensure X11 forwarding is enabled.

X11Forwarding yes

Don’t forget to test for configuration errors and restart the SSH service.

sudo sshd -t
sudo service ssh restart

Install Lightweight Desktop Environment

Both Lubuntu and XFCE4 work well, out-the-box with X2go. I installed both side-by-side for testing and both worked well together. You can even pause/suspend your Lubuntu or XFCE4 session and come back to it another time.

For XFCE4

sudo apt-get install xfce4

Note, for some reason you will also need to install the following packages or you will have missing icons.

sudo apt-get install gnome-icon-theme-full tango-icon-theme

For Lubuntu

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

Along with (a load of) other packages, you will now have XOrg installed. This means, as long as X11 forwarding has been enabled on the client side of the SSH connection, you can now test X11 with a program like firefox if you have it installed already.

Install X2Go Server Software

Install the repository package if it’s not already installed.

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

Add the X2Go repository and install packages. If using Ubuntu 10.04 or 12.04, install python-software-properties instead of the software-properties-common package.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:x2go/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install x2goserver x2goserver-xsession

For information about other distributions, see the X2Go server installation page.

DE Bindings

If you installed Lubuntu, you may want to install the following package for Desktop Environment bindings. I don’t believe there is currently a desktop bindings package for XFCE4.

sudo apt-get install x2golxdebindings

This is probably a good place to reboot if like me you’ve installed a lot of new packages.

On the Client

Again, you can install the client on just about anything – including Windows! Here I am using Manjaro i3 Community Linux.

sudo pacman -S x2goclient

X2Go also has some other clients that look useful – like a Python one for example.

SSH Client Configuration

Make sure you have at least ForwardX11 yes in /etc/ssh/ssh_config or ~/.ssh/config.

Host * ForwardX11 yes ForwardX11Trusted yes

Test X11 Forwarding

You can test that X11 is being forwarded correctly by using SSH to log onto the remove server, from your local Linux desktop, and and issue the following.

andrew@loader:~$ firefox &
[1] 2257

You might also want to setup password-less SSH key-based authentication if you’ve not done so already.

Create Sessions

For Lubuntu, select Custom Desktop and enter the below for the command.

lxsession -e LXDE -s Lubuntu

For XFCE4, you can just select XFCE.

I’m using the i3wm – I found the best result in appearance using the Use whole display option under the Input/Output tab, and then select the display (monitor) you want to use.

Resources

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/X2Go
https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/x2go-server-ubuntu-14-04/
http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:installation:x2goserver
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lubuntu-default-settings/+bug/1241958
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2228137

Minimal Desktop Environment over SSH

So I wanted to install a Java desktop application and have it publicly available on a server somewhere. Using a light weight desktop environment on one of my cloud servers made sense – provided that is, I could find something reasonably secure.

I came across X2Go and decided to give it a try on one of my Rackspace cloud servers. I used a 2 GB General Purpose v1 server and was surprised at how low the resource usage was – and consequentially how quick and responsive it all felt.

X2Go is a remote desktop tool that uses the NX technology protocol and operates entirely over a secure SSH connection. Using SSH keys makes the process of logging in pretty painless too!

I’m using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for the OS, on the server and Manjaro i3 community edition on my local desktop, as the client. On the server I tried both XFCE4 and Lubuntu as the Desktop Environments.

Personally I think I prefer XFCE4 as it was slightly easier to install and lightning quick to use. When I used Lubuntu, the start menu could take a while (like a minute!) to load. Once it had loaded though, it too was lightning quick. And to be fair to Lubuntu, I didn’t really look into it much further.

As a note to my future self, here’s what you need to do.