Stanford farmshare with NX

Yaaaay! Nomachine NX combines the advantages of both VNC and F forwarding:

1. Windows seamlessly integrate into client desktop
2. connection is persistent (when connection gets lost)

Awesome! Unfortunately the FreeNX package is outdated and buggy, but after 2 hours work I got it running

Client side (Windows)

Download the old (3.5) version of the NX client for Windows: https://www.nomachine.com/NX-3-5-0-Download-Package&Prod_Id=3835

rename:

c:\Program Files (x86)\NX Client for Windows\bin\nxssh.exe

to

c:\Program Files (x86)\NX Client for Windows\bin\mxssh.exe

download nxssh.exe from http://prdownload.berlios.de/freenx/nxssh.exe and copy it to c:\Program Files (x86)\NX Client for Windows\bin\

Connection settings:

Server: @corn07.stanford.edu
Port: 22
Desktop: Unix, Custom
Login: nhammler@U:/afs/ir/users/n/h/nhammler/NX4U/bin/nxserver-usermode
Password: [SUNET password]

• The "@" in front of the host name activates the nxssh wrapper (executes FreeNX usermode)
• The "U:" after the username executes usermode nxserver
• The path afterwards points to the nxserver-usermode binary

See source code: https://github.com/Fabianx/freenx/blob/master/freenx-utils/nxpublickey/nxssh-4US.c

Server side (corn)

First steps based on http://openfacts2.berlios.de/wikien/index.php/BerliosProject:FreeNX_-_Howto

• Download NX4U (http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenx.berlios/files/)
• untar to ~/NX4U
• edit NX4U/bin/nxloadconfig:

NX_DIR=$HOME/NX4U

• edit etc/node.conf:

ENABLE_USERMODE_AUTHENTICATION="1"
ENABLE_PASSDB_AUTHENTICATION="0"
ENABLE_SSH_AUTHENTICATION="0"
COMMAND_MD5SUM="md5sum"

The last line is the most important one; it causes nxserver to fail without any useful messages. Hints found in: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/freenx-knx/2012-March/009541.html

• install libXpm libraries:

corn is a 64 bit system but nx requires the 32 bit version of this library. Download libxpm4_3.5.10-1_i386.deb from: http://packages.ubuntu.com/de/raring/i386/libxpm4/download

and copy (with Midnight Commander - can open deb files) CONTENTS/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/*.* to NX4U/lib

Links

• http://openfacts2.berlios.de/wikien/index.php/BerliosProject:FreeNX_-_Howto
• http://openfacts2.berlios.de/wikien/index.php/BerliosProject:FreeNX_-_FAQ/Server
• http://blog.felipe-alfaro.com/2009/01/18/freenx-usermode-authentication-and-mac-os-x/
• http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/freenx-knx/2008-August/007324.html
• http://www.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/anl-nx-client.html
• http://www.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/anl-nx-linserv.html
• http://www-flc.desy.de/flc/flcwiki/J%C3%B6rgenSamson/NXClientUsermode
• http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/freenx-knx/2012-March/009541.html
• http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/FreeNX