Month: November 2015

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Installing Ansible on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

November 28, 2015 Andy 0

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. Then add the repository and 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: I also need to tell ansible to connect as the root user. Enter the […]

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X2Go on Ubuntu Server 14.04

November 21, 2015 Andy 0

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. 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. Ensure X11 forwarding is enabled. X11Forwarding yes Don’t forget to test for configuration errors and […]

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Minimal Desktop Environment over SSH

November 21, 2015 Andy 0

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 […]