Experimenting with xrdp

I needed to use the iDRAC on the prototype appliances to install FMOS. I tried several ways of using the Remote File Share feature to map the virtual media (HTTP, NFS, CIFS), but could not get any of them to work: most options appeared to do nothing, giving an error message about invalid path or credentials, without even attempting to connect to the specified server. I knew that the client-side virtual media would not work over the VPN, so I decided to try setting up a GUI on a machine in the office to run Firefox and the iDRAC virtual console applet, and then connect to it remotely.

On Fedora, setting up xrdp was pretty simple. I just installed the xrdp package, which pulled in the xorgxrdp and xorg-x11-server-Xorg. Besides adding the port to the firewall, the change I had to make was to create /etc/X11/Xwraper.config and set allowed_users=anybody, to allow non-local users to create X sessions. Then, just starting the xrdp service was all that was necessary. I did have to work around a bug by passing +glyph-cache (or ticking the corresponding checkbox to xfreerdp to get the client to connect, but otherwise, the process was pretty smooth. I then instaled firefox, i3, and icedtea-web. The only part that was somewhat confusing is that ~/.xinitrc did not work; the launch script had to be named ~/startwm.sh.