Tuesday, June 29, 2010

NX client and server for RHEL

After having used numerous ssh sessions open from your windows PC to linux, you are going to appreciate the NX client and server. They are extremely fast and easy to set up. I followed the instructions on http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/FreeNX for my RHEL 5 distributions.

Here are the quick steps. I am planning to set this up on all my boxes:

  1. Make sure what the release of RHEL or any other flavor of linux you are running is by typing the following command: cat /etc/*-release
  2. Get into a temporary folder where you can download all the binaries (e.g /tmp)
  3. Go to the Centos site to find the binaries for freenx, nx and expect which will work for you. After a bit of checking I found that CentOS release numbers are matched up with their RHEL counterparts, so I downloaded the packages for the CentOS 5.X releases:
  • wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/extras/i386/RPMS/freenx-0.7.3-4.el5.centos.i386.rpm
    • wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/extras/i386/RPMS/nx-3.4.0-4.el5.centos.i386.rpm
  1. Now install these rpms as follows:
  • rpm -Uvh nx-3.4.0-4.el5.centos.i386.rpm
    • rpm -Uvh freenx-0.7.3-4.el5.centos.i386.rpm
  1. This may tell you that you need expect. So download and install it as well
  • wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/expect-5.43.0-5.1.i386.rpm
    • rpm -Uvh expect-5.43.0-5.1.i386.rpm

You are now done with the server side. Now download the client from http://www.nomachine.com/download.php. The client requires some set up. You can pick any name for the session. If it fails to connect to the server, you need to check if you disabled encryption - it may be trying to connect to ports which are not open on your linux box. So enable encryption. Also root account works in case you have that question! Also you must remember to copy paste the client key from the server as the link above notes in the client. The windows client comes coded with some default key which doesnt work.

Note: The client key is located on the server at:

/var/lib/nxserver/home/.ssh/client.id_dsa.key




and I found most of the other dependencies for RHEL 5 here (for some reason my yum update wouldnt work):

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/




Ciao and enjoy!

### About Tukeys

Tukeys provides consulting and software services to companies in healthcare and communications that are dealing with technical or scaling challenges. Please reach out to me on LinkedIn.

An interesting quote from John Tukey, who was an American mathematician (1915-2000) -

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Today maths and statistics form the basis of how software is developed and used around us.

### About Me

Medhavi I have over 20 years of experience in healthcare, communications and AI.

I have a passion for defining innovative applications, creating product/technology strategy and solving challenging problems. My product mindset is helpful to any company to find patterns, reduce costs, and gain efficiencies.

I was the VP of Engineering at Vibrent Health, where I led the web, mobile, API and data products that supported one of the largest NIH programs - All of Us Research Program. Our system enrolled almost a million users and collected data from EHRs, surveys and wearables. Before that, I worked at hCentive, a pioneer in health exchanges.

As the CTO of 3CLogic, I helped create the first PC and web-only contact center solution that implemented PBX and CRM functionality as an affordable SaaS solution. As the Chief Architect of NexTone, I was instrumental in the development of SIP and SIP based products. SIP and associated protocols form the basis of modern WebRTC APIs.

If you are a growth company or invest in growing companies that are facing technical or scaling challenges, I can be a tremendous help. Contact me on LinkedIn.  
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