Guacamole

Apache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway, supporting VNC, RDP and SSH.

freebsd-update fetch && freebsd-update install
pkg update && pkg upgrade
pkg install guacamole-client guacamole-server
cp /usr/local/etc/guacamole-client/user-mapping.xml.sample /usr/local/etc/guacamole-client/user-mapping.xml
sysrc tomcat8_enable="YES"
sysrc guacd_enable="YES"

Guacamole-Client requires a database located on local or remote server. In this example we use MariaDB as it is widely known and supported. At the time of writing MariaDB 10.3 is the latest version and the MySQL Java Connector is at 8.0.15

pkg install mariadb103-server mysql-connector-java-8.0.15
sysrc mysql_enable="YES"
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server start

First we secure the new installation and set a root password for the MariaDB

mysql_secure_installation

Now it is time to connect to MariaDB and create our database

mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE guacamole;
CREATE USER 'guacamole'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'S3curePassw0rd';
GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE ON guacamole.* TO 'guacamole'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit

We add the tables and setup basic file and folder structure

cd /usr/local/share/guacamole-client/
tar xvfz guacamole-auth-jdbc.tar.gz
cd guacamole-auth-jdbc-1.0.0/mysql/schema
cat *.sql | mysql -u root -p guacamole
mkdir /usr/local/etc/guacamole-client/extensions
mkdir /usr/local/etc/guacamole-client/lib
cp /usr/local/share/guacamole-client/guacamole-auth-jdbc-1.0.0/mysql/guacamole-auth-jdbc-mysql-1.0.0.jar /usr/local/etc/guacamole-client/extensions/
cp /usr/local/share/java/classes/mysql-connector-java.jar /usr/local/etc/guacamole-client/lib/
cd /usr/local/etc/guacamole-client/
cp guacamole.properties.sample guacamole.properties

The file guacamole.properties must be filled with our new environment

guacd-hostname: localhost
guacd-port:     4822
mysql-hostname: localhost
mysql-port: 3306
mysql-database: guacamole
mysql-username: guacamole
mysql-password: S3curePassw0rd!
mysql-default-max-connections-per-user: 0
mysql-default-max-group-connections-per-user: 0

Finally we restart guacd and tomcat8

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/guacd restart
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/tomcat8 restart

If you get a blank screen while connecting to http://<yourhost>:8080/guacamole/ check the logs:

tail -f /usr/local/apache-tomcat-8.0/logs/catalina.out

Maybe the timezone of MariaDB is wrong or unrecognized, then you have to set a new one that fits your region

mysql -u root -p
SET GLOBAL time_zone = '+2:00'; (hours counting from UTC)