compile and install issues on rhel8

[Kropyls]

Following the guide on the readme at the root of the project, I am not able to successfully rdp into a rhel8 box. I'm assuming I am missing something basic, so hopefully some kind soul is able to see what I am missing. The sources I'm using are the 10.4.1 release.

Reproduction steps:

• install a rhel8 box with GUI
• ensure test user can log in via console and has GUI
• disable firewalld
• disable selinux
• follow bootstrap/configure/install proceedure in readme
• comment out Xvnc section of xrdp.ini
• fix the Xorg param to "/usr/libexec/Xorg" inside sesman.ini
• start the xrdp daemon
• observe the login failures (logs attached)

If I have missed something obvious please accept my apologies, and thanks for taking the time to read this.

-Matt

test-xrdp-sesman.log
test-xrdp.log

[matt335672]

Hi Matt

You also need to build and install xorgxrdp as well, to use Xorg. This may be it.

I assume there's a good reason you're not installing xrdp (and xorgxrdp) from EPEL? The EPEL maintainer does a very good job of keeping xrdp up to date.

[Kropyls]

Thanks for taking the time to reply! We do have a good reason for not using the rpms, but for testing we decided do use them on a fresh server. Unfortunately we are not seeing improved results. For the record, we are still using xorg as our login backend, with no other changes. The session closes immediately upon a sucessful auth (the user can log in from the console, just like before).

there is an .xsession-errors log in the user's homedir but it is empty. I've attached the logs.

debug-xrdp-sesman.log
debug-xrdp.log

the following 3 packages are installed:
xrdp-selinux-0.10.4-2.el8.x86_64
xrdp-0.10.4-2.el8.x86_64
xorgxrdp-0.10.4-1.el8.x86_64

Thank you for your time and assistance,
-Matt

[matt335672]

According to the sesman log, the session is exiting very quickly. Here's a few things to try:

1. Check the RDP user isn't already logged in to the console of the server. This isn't supported
2. Check the complete system log immediately after a failed session with sudo journalctl -S -1m
3. Try running the session start script from the command line and getting a trace. The trace may continue into ~/.xsession-errors if it gets that far:

DISPLAY= sh -x /etc/xrdp/startwm.sh

[Kropyls]

Thanks again for the reply. Me and my coworker @JoseG53 have been testing this, and it seems our issues have to do with your first bullet. If the user logs into the box, even after logging out, they still have issues getting in via rdp sometimes. The fix seems to be rebooting the box if the user has logged in via the console at any point.

I'm not sure if that's exactly what you meant by your first bullet, but it's what we are observing.

Thank you for the help so far - we are now going to attempt to compile it again ourselves and see if that resolves our issues. I'll post again here if I have more information. Thank you for your help so far!

[matt335672]

The recommendation is simply not to use the same users locally as you use over RDP.

If you have to do this, make sure the first logout has completed from a systemd point-of-view by looking at the loginctl output. If systemd --user is still running for the process, there could be some issues.

[Kropyls]

We got it working both with the pre-packaged version and compiling it ourselves, thanks to your recommendations. Thank you for the help!