Lately I’ve embarked in installing the latest version of Guacamole, 0.9.8, in a fresh installation of CentOS 7. Kudos go to the excellent guide I found from here.  Derek’s guide is for 0.9.7 but it also works for 0.9.8. I ran into a few hangups but after I figured them out it worked beautifully.

First, fetch the needed binaries:

rpm -Uvh http://mirror.metrocast.net/fedora/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm   # EPEL Repo
yum -y install wget   # wget
wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/felfert/Fedora_19/home:felfert.repo && mv home\:felfert.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/   # Felfert Repo
yum -y install tomcat libvncserver freerdp libvorbis libguac libguac-client-vnc libguac-client-rdp libguac-client-ssh
yum -y install cairo-devel pango-devel libvorbis-devel openssl-devel gcc pulseaudio-libs-devel libvncserver-devel terminus-fonts \
freerdp-devel uuid-devel libssh2-devel libtelnet libtelnet-devel tomcat-webapps tomcat-admin-webapps java-1.7.0-openjdk.x86_64

Next, install guac server (the latest as of this writing is 0.9.8)

mkdir ~/guacamole && cd ~/
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/guacamole/files/current/source/guacamole-server-0.9.8.tar.gz
tar -xzf guacamole-server-0.9.8.tar.gz && cd guacamole-server-0.9.8
./configure --with-init-dir=/etc/init.d
make
make install
ldconfig

I received an error while running ./configure :

checking for jpeg_start_compress in -ljpeg... no
configure: error: "libjpeg is required for writing jpeg messages"

It means I didn’t have libjpeg dev libraries installed. Easily fixed:

yum install libjpeg-turbo-devel

Next, install the guacamole war files

mkdir -p /var/lib/guacamole && cd /var/lib/guacamole/
 wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/guacamole/files/current/binary/guacamole-0.9.8.war -O guacamole.war
 ln -s /var/lib/guacamole/guacamole.war /var/lib/tomcat/webapps/
 rm -rf /usr/lib64/freerdp/guacdr.so
 ln -s /usr/local/lib/freerdp/guacdr.so /usr/lib64/freerdp/

Next comes configuring the database

#Install database and connector
yum -y install mariadb mariadb-server
 mkdir -p ~/guacamole/sqlauth && cd ~/guacamole/sqlauth
 wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/guacamole/files/current/extensions/guacamole-auth-jdbc-0.9.8.tar.gz
 tar -zxf guacamole-auth-jdbc-0.9.8.tar.gz
 wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/Connector/j/mysql-connector-java-5.1.32.tar.gz
 tar -zxf mysql-connector-java-5.1.32.tar.gz
 mkdir -p /usr/share/tomcat/.guacamole/{extensions,lib}
 mv guacamole-auth-jdbc-0.9.8/mysql/guacamole-auth-jdbc-mysql-0.9.8.jar /usr/share/tomcat/.guacamole/extensions/
 mv mysql-connector-java-5.1.32/mysql-connector-java-5.1.32-bin.jar /usr/share/tomcat/.guacamole/lib/
 systemctl restart mariadb.service

#Configure database
mysqladmin -u root password MySQLRootPass
mysql -u root -p   # Enter above password
create database guacdb;
create user 'guacuser'@'localhost' identified by 'guacDBpass';
grant select,insert,update,delete on guacdb.* to 'guacuser'@'localhost';
flush privileges;
quit
cd ~/guacamole/sqlauth/guacamole-auth-jdbc-0.9.8/mysql/schema/
cat ./*.sql | mysql -u root -p guacdb   # Enter SQL root password set above

Now we need to configure guacamole to use our new database.

mkdir -p /etc/guacamole/ && vi /etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties

# MySQL properties
mysql-hostname: localhost
mysql-port: 3306
mysql-database: guacdb
mysql-username: guacuser
mysql-password: guacDBpass

# Additional settings
mysql-disallow-duplicate-connections: false

Link the file you just made to the tomcat configuration directory

ln -s /etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties /usr/share/tomcat/.guacamole/

Cleanup temporary files and enable necessary services on boot

cd ~ && rm -rf guacamole*
systemctl enable tomcat.service && systemctl enable mariadb.service && chkconfig guacd on
systemctl reboot

Lastly, open the firewall up for port 8080 (thanks stack overflow)

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8080/tcp
firewall-cmd --reload

Navigate to guacamole in your browser: http://<IP address>/guacamole:8080. You should see the guacamole login screen.

Additional hiccup

This new version of guacamole has a different user interface. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize how to get out of a guacamole session once it’s started. Sessions are now full screen with no obvious way to exit.

The way to exit the full screen guacamole session is to press the magic key combination of ctrl, alt, and shift. It will reveal a menu from the side. This is all clearly defined in the user documentation, but my lack of willingness to read it caused me to waste much time. Lesson learned!