Quickstart Guide

This is the legacy v1.x documentation. For the latest Glyptodon documentation please visit: https://docs.keeper.io/glyptodon

The “Quickstart Guide” is a walkthrough which covers a typical install of Glyptodon Enterprise, and configuring and testing access to a remote desktop. It takes roughly five minutes to run through the guide from start to finish, including time waiting for packages to download.

For convenience, we have also created an accompanying video which walks through installing Glyptodon Enterprise following this guide:

Set up the YUM repository

If you have not already done so, the Glyptodon Enterprise YUM repository needs to be defined, such that the “yum” utility can find the various RPM packages which make up Glyptodon Enterprise.

The necessary repository definition file is distribution specific and can be viewed within your account information on the Glyptodon Enterprise website. Locate your Linux distribution within the "downloads" section of your Glyptodon Enterprise account, copy the contents of the file shown, and use a text editor to paste the contents into a new file within /etc/yum.repos.d:

$ sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/glyptodon.repo

This file should ultimately look like:

[glyptodon]
name=Glyptodon Enterprise
baseurl=https://USERNAME:[email protected]/release/1/el/$releasever/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://enterprise.glyptodon.com/release/RPM-GPG-KEY-glyptodon-release

where “USERNAME” and “PASSWORD” are the repository credentials which were generated for you when your organization’s Glyptodon Enterprise account was created.

Install the @glyptodon-guacamole package group

Before installing Apache Guacamole on CentOS or RHEL 6, the EPEL repository must be enabled:

$ sudo yum install epel-release

Guacamole depends on libwebp, and though this is part of the CentOS and RHEL 7 repositories, it is not included in older versions.

Glyptodon Enterprise provides a @glyptodon-guacamole package group for convenience which installs all of the packages typically required for an Apache Guacamole deployment, and includes support for VNC, RDP, and SSH:

$ sudo yum install @glyptodon-guacamole

This will install the following key packages:

Package name	Description
glyptodon-guacamole	The Apache Guacamole web application
glyptodon-guacd	The Apache Guacamole proxy daemon
glyptodon-libguac-client-vnc	VNC support for guacd
glyptodon-libguac-client-rdp	RDP support for guacd
glyptodon-libguac-client-ssh	SSH support for guacd

Deploy Guacamole under Tomcat

Apache Guacamole is a web application which is served through the Apache Tomcat application server. If you have not already installed Tomcat, you must do so prior to deploying Guacamole:

$ sudo yum install tomcat

Once Tomcat is installed, the “tomcat” system user must be added to the “guacamole” group, such that the Guacamole web application running under Tomcat will be able to read its own configuration files:

$ sudo usermod -aG guacamole tomcat

To deploy Guacamole to Tomcat, create a symbolic link from the web application’s guacamole.war file, located in /opt/glyptodon/share/guacamole, within /var/lib/tomcat/webapps:

$ sudo ln -s /opt/glyptodon/share/guacamole/guacamole.war /var/lib/tomcat/webapps/

Start Tomcat and guacd

Apache Guacamole is served by Tomcat and requires its proxy daemon service, “guacd”, in order to connect to remote desktops. Thus, both the "tomcat" and "guacd" services must be started for Guacamole to function, and should be configured to start automatically on boot. On CentOS / RHEL 7, this is done using systemd's "systemctl" utility:

$ sudo systemctl start guacd tomcat
$ sudo systemctl enable guacd tomcat

If you are deploying Guacamole under CentOS / RHEL 6, you will need to instead use the traditional "service" and "chkconfig" utilities:

$ sudo service guacd start
$ sudo service tomcat start
$ sudo chkconfig guacd on
$ sudo chkconfig tomcat on

Congratulations! At this point, Apache Guacamole should be working, and a login screen should be visible if you visit http://HOSTNAME:8080/guacamole/ with a web browser, where “HOSTNAME” is the hostname or IP address of your server.

Add a test user and connection

Apache Guacamole comes with a built-in, simplified, XML-driven authentication mechanism for the sake of testing. You can verify that your Guacamole installation is functional by editing the user-mapping.xml configuration file used by this mechanism to add a user and a few connections:

$ sudo vi /etc/guacamole/user-mapping.xml

The user-mapping.xml file consists of a main <user-mapping> element and any number of <authorize> blocks describing users, their passwords, and the connections they can access. For example, to add a user named “test-user” with password “test-password” and access to a single SSH connection to the Guacamole server itself, you would add an <authorize> block like:

<authorize username="test-user" password="test-password">
    <connection name="Test Connection">
        <protocol>ssh</protocol>
        <param name="hostname">localhost</param>
    </connection>
</authorize>

This file is automatically reread when modified, so you should be able to immediately log in when you define a new user in this way. Changes to an active user’s connections defined within “user-mapping.xml” will not be available to that user until they logout, however.