F20 and Rawhide: Headless install and enabling VNC

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 18:44 -0700, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 10:13:28PM +0100, Robert M. Albrecht wrote:
> > 
> > But is there any official way to enable VNC on a headless server ?
> > 
> > I can ssh to this machines, but how do I access this machine via VNC ?
> > 
> > I can enable VNC in the Gnome Control Center if I connect a monitor,
> > but how do I enable this via ssh ?
> 
> If you install tigervnc-server it comes with
> /usr/lib/systemd/system/vncserver at .service
> This has a header comment which starts like that:
> 
> # The vncserver service unit file
> #
> # Quick HowTo:
> # 1. Copy this file to /etc/systemd/system/vncserver at .service
> # 2. Edit <USER> and vncserver parameters appropriately
> #   ("runuser -l <USER> -c /usr/bin/vncserver %i -arg1 -arg2")
> # 3. Run `systemctl daemon-reload`
> # 4. Run `systemctl enable vncserver@:<display>.service`
> #
> .....
> (and quite a bit more of relevant informations).  I did not try that
> myself but I do not see why this should not work.
> 
> > /etc/sysconfig/vncserver seems to be gone since F19 ?
> 
> Yeah; systemd actually allows to pass various configuration details via
> "enviroment files" but a general tendency and apparently heavily
> encouraged is to make this "copy and edit".  Personally I am finding
> that quite idiotic and detrimental to a long run maintenance.  With an
> every update you should check now if something did not change you need
> to take care of.  Multiply that by a number of such "hand configured"
> services and here you are.  An alternative is configure such a thing
> once, forget it, and try to guess what is happening when in the future
> something goes screwy.

The *point* of the copy-and-edit system is so the 'stock' configuration
can be updated and you don't wind up with .rpmnews all over the place.
If we ship it as /etc/systemd/system/vncserver at .service and you edit it,
it's never going to be 'magically' reconciled on update, you'll just get
a .rpmnew file. That's not any better.

Things could still change behind your back and make your /etc/sysconfig
file not work any more in the old system...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net