Getting VMWare Remote Console 11.0.0 - Connection Error

I had the problem as described at Solved: VMware Remote Console 11. - connection error, but that was for Windows. On Windows, the post says, the preferences file is at: C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\VMware\preferences.ini

But after a bit of poking around, on my MacOS Cataline systems the configuration file was at: /Users/user/Library/Containers/com.vmware.vmrc/Data/Library/Preferences/VMware Remote Console/preferences

Adding the line pref.preferWebMKS = "FALSE" to the bottom of the file made things work for me.

Windows 10's OpenSSH Server

My instance of Windows 10 on Oracle's VirtualBox had been starating to lag, plus all I mostly use it for is to modify Active Directory groups. The University got VMware, so I might as well use it. In the course getting it to work I discovered Microsoft now provides an OpenSSH server, and command line tools modify Active Directory. Here are the steps I took to get this to work.

1. With the help of OIT and my departments lovely and talanted desktop support people I got an instance of Windows 10 up and running on the University's domain with the latest updates.
2. Before going into Settings: Optional features to Add a feature the following needed to be done.*
   • Use the gpedit.exe command, and navigate to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > All Settings > Specify settings for optional component instalation and component repair, and double click. Enable it, I ended up also checking Download repair content and optional features directly from Windows Update instead of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).
   • I actually had to start VPN too.†
   • Now adding Optional features should work.
3. Install "OpenSSH Server" and "RSAT: Active Directory Domain Services and Lightweight Directory Service Tools". The OpenSSH client was already installed.
4. Mostly following the directions at Installation of OpenSSH For Windows Server 2019 and Windows 10 after, in a PowerShell do:
   • Start-Service sshd
   • Set-Service -Name sshd -StartupType 'Automatic'
   Reboot and you should be able to ssh to the systems.
5. You might not want to let everybody on your domain to ssh into the systems, so you will want to edit the %programdata%\ssh\sshd_config file, for me %programdata% turned out to be C:\ProgramData but I assume that is not always so. I limited wich groups can login with the AllowGroups directive, to get a list of groups you are in you can do whoami /GROUPS command.
6. Now you can ssh into the system and use the dsget, dsquery, dsmod, and others commands to modify Active Directory without every seeing a Windows GUI.

smbd(8) without CUPS*

Even with load printers = no in my /etc/samba/smb.conf I was still getting Unable to connect to CUPS server localhost:631 - Connection refused in my logs. To get rid of these I added:

 load printers = no
 printing = bsd
 printcap name = /dev/null
disable spoolss = yes

to the [global] section. No more messages.

Open Source RStudio PAM authication

Downloaded RStudio from https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download-server/ and installed it on a fresh CentOS 7 system and logging in didn't work. rstudio-server verify-installation reported no errors. Well it seem to be PAM fault.

In the end I copied /etc/pam.d/sshd over to /etc/pam.d/rstudio and all worked in the end. I did reädd:

auth      requisite      pam_succeed_if.so uid >= 500 quiet

To the top of the file, but all now seems to work well.

ssh(1) grawlix security

I use VirtualBox for testing all the time, and reinstall virtual systems on it ofter, during Cobbler testing many time a day! There in lies the issue with the ever changing sshd(8) host keys, ever editing your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. But fear on, simply add:

Host host-with-ever-changing-key-here
    StrictHostKeyChecking no
    UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null  
  

to your ~/.ssh/config file and it will never bother you again, somebody might be spying on you, but that is as different issue.

gvim(1) and Fonts

At a users request, I yum install vim-X11 xorg-x11-xauth on a headless CentOS 6.7 server, then ssh -X into the server and:

$ gvim
E665: Cannot start GUI, no valid font foundE852: The child process failed to start the GUI

DuckDuckGoing (and later Googling) the error has me trying all sorts of weird set guifont=… all to no avail. GNU emacs(1) works fine! Finally, to get it to work: yum groupinstall "Legacy X Window System compatibility" and all worked. Hopefully some search engine will find this and save others some time.

The emacs provided with CentOS 7 seems to depend on the fonts gvim-X11 should also depend on, so there simply yum istall vim-X11 xorg-x11-xauth emacs should do the trick.

Running svnserve(8) on CentOS 7 with Encryped Passwords

I temporarally disabled SELinux with the setenforce(8) command, I hope to revisit this issue later but as I'm only testing I don't deal with it here.

Packages

• subversion
• cyrus-sasl-md5*

Steps

1. # mkdir /var/svn

   This location can be changed in the /etc/sysconfig/svnserve file. The default settings seem to store repos as the root user.

2. # cd /var/svn; svnadmin create buggles

   This is where buggles is the name of your repo. You can put more this one repo in the /var/svn diroctory, each gets configured separately.

3. Edit the /var/svn/buggles/config/svnserve.conf to have the following section:

   [sasl]
   use-sasl = true

   You might want to comment out the password-db option too.

4. In the same file, modify the realm option to have no spaces.
5. Futz with /var/svn/buggles/config/authz too.
6. Create an /etc/sasl2/svn.conf file that looks like.†

   pwcheck_method: auxprop
   auxprop_plugin: sasldb
   sasldb_path: /etc/subversion/sasldb
   mech_list: DIGEST-MD5

7. # saslpasswd2 -c -f /etc/subversion/sasldb -u realm sven

   Where realm is the realm entered in the svnserve.conf file and sven is the username. It will propt you for a password.

8. # systemctl start svnserve

   And it should work.