Lately I’ve been trying to upgrade my installation of Guacamole 0.9.8 to 0.9.9. You’d think it would be simple. It is not. I ended up just blowing up my 0.9.8 VM and starting over, this time with Ubuntu 15.10. I found this excellent guide which got me most of the way there, with one small hiccup that took way more time than it should have to figure out.

I will paste the guide I got from the above site for convenience with my added notes for clarification on parts that I had trouble with.

Installation

#!/bin/bash
# WORKING ON UBUNTU 15.10 WITH GUAC 0.9.9 AND TOMCAT8

#Update Everything
apt-get update && apt-get -y dist-upgrade

#Install Stuff
#You will be prompted for a mysql root password. Remember this for the configuration step; change MYSQLROOTPASSWORD to whatever you enter here.
apt-get -y install libcairo2-dev libpng12-dev libossp-uuid-dev libfreerdp-dev libpango1.0-dev libssh2-1-dev libtelnet-dev libvncserver-dev libpulse-dev libssl-dev libvorbis-dev libwebp-dev mysql-server mysql-client mysql-common mysql-utilities tomcat8

# Install libjpeg-turbo-dev
wget -O libjpeg-turbo-official_1.4.2_amd64.deb http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/libjpeg-turbo/1.4.2/libjpeg-turbo-official_1.4.2_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libjpeg-turbo-official_1.4.2_amd64.deb

# Add GUACAMOLE_HOME to Tomcat8 ENV
echo "" >> /etc/default/tomcat8
echo "# GUACAMOLE EVN VARIABLE" >> /etc/default/tomcat8
echo "GUACAMOLE_HOME=/etc/guacamole" >> /etc/default/tomcat8

#Download Guacamole Files
wget -O guacamole-0.9.9.war http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/guacamole/current/binary/guacamole-0.9.9.war
wget -O guacamole-server-0.9.9.tar.gz http://sourceforge.net/projects/guacamole/files/current/source/guacamole-server-0.9.9.tar.gz
wget -O guacamole-auth-jdbc-0.9.9.tar.gz http://sourceforge.net/projects/guacamole/files/current/extensions/guacamole-auth-jdbc-0.9.9.tar.gz
wget -O mysql-connector-java-5.1.38.tar.gz http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/Connector/j/mysql-connector-java-5.1.38.tar.gz

#Extract Guac
tar -xzf guacamole-server-0.9.9.tar.gz
tar -xzf guacamole-auth-jdbc-0.9.9.tar.gz
tar -xzf mysql-connector-java-5.1.38.tar.gz

# MAKE DIRECTORIES
mkdir /etc/guacamole
mkdir /etc/guacamole/lib
mkdir /etc/guacamole/extensions

# Install GUACD
cd guacamole-server-0.9.9
./configure --with-init-dir=/etc/init.d
make
make install
ldconfig
systemctl enable guacd
cd ..

# Move files to correct locations
mv guacamole-0.9.9.war /etc/guacamole/guacamole.war
ln -s /etc/guacamole/guacamole.war /var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/
cp mysql-connector-java-5.1.38/mysql-connector-java-5.1.38-bin.jar /etc/guacamole/lib/
cp guacamole-auth-jdbc-0.9.9/mysql/guacamole-auth-jdbc-mysql-0.9.9.jar /etc/guacamole/extensions/

Configuration

# Configure guacamole.properties 
echo "mysql-hostname: localhost" >> /etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties 
echo "mysql-port: 3306" >> /etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties 
echo "mysql-database: guacamole_db" >> /etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties 
echo "mysql-username: guacamole_user" >> /etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties
 
# This is where you will want to change "PASSWORD" 
echo "mysql-password: PASSWORD" >> /etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties 
rm -rf /usr/share/tomcat8/.guacamole 
ln -s /etc/guacamole /usr/share/tomcat8/.guacamole 

# Restart Tomcat Service 
service tomcat8 restart

#Configure the MySQL database
#Make sure you change MYSQLROOTPASSWORD and PASSWORD
mysql -u root -pMYSQLROOTPASSWORD
create database guacamole_db;
create user 'guacamole_user'@'localhost' identified by 'PASSWORD';
GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE ON guacamole_db.* TO 'guacamole_user'@'localhost';
flush privileges;
quit

#Populate the database
#Make sure you change MYSQLROOTPASSWORD
cat guacamole-auth-jdbc-0.9.9/mysql/schema/*.sql | mysql -u root -pMYSQLROOTPASSWORD guacamole_db

After that it should be as simple as logging into your shiny guacamale server as guacadmin/guacadmin.

It wasn’t that simple for me. When I tried to log in all I got was a blank page. Reading the log file /var/log/tomcat8/localhost.<date>.log revealed the following:

Error querying database. Cause: java.sql.SQLException: Access denied for user 'guacamole_user '@'localhost' (using password: YES)

I kept changing and double checking the password for guacamole and couldn’t figure out why it was getting access denied. I even manually logged into mysql with that username and password and it worked, yet guacamole would not load in the browser.

After staring at the log long enough I realized that there is a space before the closing tick on the username. Aha! There were pesky trailing spaces in my guacamole.properties. Removing those spaces did the trick. Always some mundane detail!

Finally I have guacamole 0.9.9 working.