VNC Option Not Available for VM Displays

[sfatula]

I know that there are various options all with different pros and cons for Linux. But why you folks use anything but RDP for Windows I fail to understand.

I can't see boot messages or issues, RDP does some other things I do not like that Spice/VNC does not. I'd much rather not use RDP myself, but, it's all preference mostly. I have 4 different VMs with 4 different OSes, so, they all work in remmina (my client) and thus they're in one spot instead of multiple spots. That's my reasons.

 

[gringo1er]

Before updating to cobian, I used the integrated VNC viewer in order to install linux VMs, and for the rest I keep in touch with them through Putty.

But when I install it with Spice, it chooses whatever keyboard language, so for example, it's difficult to use a right password with putty after install...
@sfatula, the viewer works fine. How can I add the spice link to the "recent / favorites" list?

 

[Joe-freenas]

TLDR; It looks like it was removed? IMO it's a moot point and you shouldn't use it anyway?

Hmmm. Typically I turn off/remove the displays devices after getting SSH or RDP setup because VNC is not particularly secure so I hadn't checked this after I upgraded. Been using SCALE as my hypervisor since the beginning...so this is interesting to me. Thanks for posting.

As an aside, I wouldn't recommend you use the "DISPLAY" feature in TrueNAS for anything other than debugging or initial setup purposes... SPICE or VNC are by their nature a security risk, you are literally exposing (unnecessary) console-level access to your systems over the network. In your case you are at least using a good VNC client, but unfortunately any bad


This VM has been off a while (since before I upgraded.)
View attachment 69847

It has an existing display device, and it does sees to have been converted to SPICE.
View attachment 69848


For giggle and laughs, I can confirm that I no longer see the VNC/SPICE option menu (when adding a new Display Device after the VM creation Wizard), IIRC that was present before. But for sure, it always defaulted to VNC.

I dug a bit deeper, and unless it was named something other than "novnc" it just seems be gone. I'd assume they chose to support SPICE over VNC and dropped one of them to have to maintain less packages. FWIW I had all sorts of problems with VNC throughout different versions of SCALE that made it unusable for me in the WebUI anyway.

It was a weird and highly inconsistent (but repeatable for those systems affected) problem that I saw crop up here from some other folks as well. I don't think anyone ever figured out exactly why some of the issues happened but they did improve the implementation over time. At one point I couldn't use it at all, and now it works most of the time...and when it doesn't a reboot fixes it. FWIW this only ever affected the WebUI button, using an external client like you are always worked.

My problem recap here is really only to express that I personally never really used an external NoVNC client for anything...other than testing because of my problem. I also prefer to use more secure methods of working on my VMs anyway. I'd bet alot of other folks here would agree with this as being a better workflow.

Obviously I haven't looked back at it since I upgraded last week...so I'm curious if SPICE solved my problem anyway. I never tried it before now. So thank you for the journey down this rabbit hole lol

Code:

root@prod[/]# find / -path /mnt -prune -o -name novnc -print
find: ‘/proc/2164464’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164605’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164610’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164612’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164613’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164616’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164617’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164676’: No such file or directory
root@prod[/]#

Sidenote: What's interesting is the tooltip reports as being the bind port for VNC, which may just be a UI artifact that wasn't caught in pre-BETA testing.
View attachment 69846

TLDR; It looks like it was removed? IMO it's a moot point and you shouldn't use it anyway?

Hmmm. Typically I turn off/remove the displays devices after getting SSH or RDP setup because VNC is not particularly secure so I hadn't checked this after I upgraded. Been using SCALE as my hypervisor since the beginning...so this is interesting to me. Thanks for posting.

As an aside, I wouldn't recommend you use the "DISPLAY" feature in TrueNAS for anything other than debugging or initial setup purposes... SPICE or VNC are by their nature a security risk, you are literally exposing (unnecessary) console-level access to your systems over the network. In your case you are at least using a good VNC client, but unfortunately any bad


This VM has been off a while (since before I upgraded.)
View attachment 69847

It has an existing display device, and it does sees to have been converted to SPICE.
View attachment 69848


For giggle and laughs, I can confirm that I no longer see the VNC/SPICE option menu (when adding a new Display Device after the VM creation Wizard), IIRC that was present before. But for sure, it always defaulted to VNC.

I dug a bit deeper, and unless it was named something other than "novnc" it just seems be gone. I'd assume they chose to support SPICE over VNC and dropped one of them to have to maintain less packages. FWIW I had all sorts of problems with VNC throughout different versions of SCALE that made it unusable for me in the WebUI anyway.

It was a weird and highly inconsistent (but repeatable for those systems affected) problem that I saw crop up here from some other folks as well. I don't think anyone ever figured out exactly why some of the issues happened but they did improve the implementation over time. At one point I couldn't use it at all, and now it works most of the time...and when it doesn't a reboot fixes it. FWIW this only ever affected the WebUI button, using an external client like you are always worked.

My problem recap here is really only to express that I personally never really used an external NoVNC client for anything...other than testing because of my problem. I also prefer to use more secure methods of working on my VMs anyway. I'd bet alot of other folks here would agree with this as being a better workflow.

Obviously I haven't looked back at it since I upgraded last week...so I'm curious if SPICE solved my problem anyway. I never tried it before now. So thank you for the journey down this rabbit hole lol

Code:

root@prod[/]# find / -path /mnt -prune -o -name novnc -print
find: ‘/proc/2164464’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164605’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164610’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164612’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164613’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164616’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164617’: No such file or directory
find: ‘/proc/2164676’: No such file or directory
root@prod[/]#

Sidenote: What's interesting is the tooltip reports as being the bind port for VNC, which may just be a UI artifact that wasn't caught in pre-BETA testing.
View attachment 69846

Ahhh, the voice of a not so expert.

You have NEVER needed the *actual* console when your Windows, and yes, even Linux/BSD VMs fail updates, or some other
*NOT YOUR FAULT* reason and won't boot all the way or will not connect to the network! Fess up!

Now:
What EXACTLY would be the "security" difference between SPICE and RDP?
(given the exact same passwords, to start, for example!?).

What IF, you actually know what you are doing and your simply secure/VLAN/VPN the network that you ALLOW VNC/SPICE to connect FROM!?

Generalizations like that are what gives a bad name to the real computer science people that spend time getting to now how the thing works EXACTLY, and NOT just to have a "good idea"!

 

[Joe-freenas]

I upgraded to the Cobra beta a couple days ago. Overall, it's running well, but I was not able to connect to any of my VMs with the realVNC client. It appears that the displays on each of my 3 VMs were converted to SPICE. I was able to open the web browser spice display, but would prefer to use the VNC client. I tried deleting the display, went to add a new one and no longer see the option to choose between spice and VNC. Is VNC no longer offered as an option for VMs?

If you were to be observant, you would have checked the release notes before just jumping in.
Would have also already have a 2nd way to do Remote Desktop (it never fails when one of them FAILS after an upgrade!!!).
Would also have a backup of the previous version/config, ready to go.
Would understand that you can always go back and stay with the previous version, forever!
Would have figured out how to make VNC, RDP or xrdp work on your own.

For TrueNAS Scale still being an almost "fresh work in-progress", it has done excellent, and it is only because of the experience and VERY good testing that IX Systems does (as opposed to say... pfsense!).

I do love this product and will follow the devs wherever they want to take it!

Yeah, sucks that they MUST take options, choices and flexibility, like aux SMB parameters?, AWAY from dumb people, but that is the ONLY way to
become REALLY PRODUCTION READY!!!

Before updating to cobian, I used the integrated VNC viewer in order to install linux VMs, and for the rest I keep in touch with them through Putty.

But when I install it with Spice, it chooses whatever keyboard language, so for example, it's difficult to use a right password with putty after install...
@sfatula, the viewer works fine. How can I add the spice link to the "recent / favorites" list?

This is your environment.
Help us help you and do tell what exactly you are doing/using/trying.

I can't see boot messages or issues, RDP does some other things I do not like that Spice/VNC does not. I'd much rather not use RDP myself, but, it's all preference mostly. I have 4 different VMs with 4 different OSes, so, they all work in remmina (my client) and thus they're in one spot instead of multiple spots. That's my reasons.

Well, do tell us what SPECIFIC protocol that Remmina client uses for each VM?
Explain what "RDP does some other things I do not like " means... (Either explain, give details or don't waste space/time?).
4 different OSes? What's that? Windows, BSD, Linux and ......?

I too was a bit ticked when they changed to Spice, but I knew that VNC, free VNC at least, has NEVER been GREAT, so I implemented RDP/xrdp
from the beginning and didn't need to rush to figure out what they did.

I use RDP/xrdp for 100% of my GUI servers/clients and VMs. Windows and Unix, and it just works for me, with SOUND from Linux TOO!
What else would you need?

 

[sfatula]

Sorry, don't need to tell anything. Not sure why you are wanting to argue with people. I will say, not exactly worried about the security risk sitting at home on a home NAS like many here.

I dislike RDP, a lot. And I don't need to explain why to continue a senseless argument. This thread is about VNC no longer being an option, which it isn't. You like RDP, use it!

 

[apl]

I get constant hangs of a few seconds with this in the quest (Ubuntu 22.04) log:

Nov 27 10:15:26 vm1 kernel: [TTM] Buffer eviction failed
Nov 27 10:15:26 vm1 kernel: qxl 0000:00:02.0: object_init failed for (16388096, 0x00000001)
Nov 27 10:15:26 vm1 kernel: [drm:qxl_alloc_bo_reserved [qxl]] *ERROR* failed to allocate VRAM BO

According to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-qxl/+bug/1972914 setting the vgamem to 64M might help, but the UI doesn't allow me to set it, and editing the XML doesn't help, because it gets overwritten all the time by the management backend. Does anyone know if I can locally edit the management backend to change this value? I should make a feature request for setting it, though I'd first like to try if it actually solves the problem.

 

[theikid]

Hi there. I'm trying to connect to my VM using virt-viewer from my Mac with no luck. Spice web client inside scale is not supporting my French MacBook keyboard so I would love to use a client. Anyone could help me with that ? @draiko913 How did you manage to connect from Mac if I may ask? thanks !

 

[apl]

Use remote-viewer.

 

[theikid]

Use remote-viewer.

Hi, I've tried but I'm getting 'cannot open display: " error which I can't find info.

 

[theikid]

I finally just bought from "aSpice" rom the App Store which works perfectly. It also solved my keyboard issue !

 

[stergio]

I have performance/stability issues with Spice display on TrueNAS-SCALE-22.12.4.2, I have to refresh the browser often in order to get control of anything on the desktop. I am running an X8DT6/X8DTE super-micro board with dual Xeon E5506 (2.2Ghz) 196GB DDR3 ECC ram. Previous Truenas version (22.12.3.1) did not have performance/stability problems with spice or noVNC in the Truenas display for VMs. In version 22.12.3.1, I chose to use noVNC due to the controls it offered over the the Spice Truenas display, just like many other mentioned in this thread, it was very robust.

I read the update notes that mentioned the drop of noVNC but was ok with it due to the other need fixes that I would get in the updated version I am on now. Was not aware of the poor performance of VM display with Spice. No too sure it is a spice issue.

Performance is so bad, I have wait for the (Ubuntu or any other OS) VM to load, and struggle through till I get to the sharing properties and enable remote control then I ditch Truenas spice, I just close it. Then I use realVNC viewer for Windows installed on my laptop to display things on the ubuntu vm, it is smooth sailing in realVNC viewer.

The big pain is if I want to see any bios booting or observer the progress of an install for any prompts, that only happens in SPICE, and I have fumble through this by hitting refresh on the browser constantly to see the prompts, installs are a struggle!!!

I read through this thread and I noticed a lot mention that using Truenas VM display with spice works well, I do not have a graphics card installed, just what ever graphics chip is built in (matrox I believe?). Could that also be the case for the poor performance, no dedicated graphics card? If so, there is definitely some bug or something with SPICE in this 22.12.4.2 version. In version 22.12.3.1 the display with spice did not behave this way prior to the update.

Really odd.... Hope they fix this performance/stability issue or bring back the noVNC viewer in Truenas. I have a work around but it is only good after all services are running after the VM boots up.

Ugh - fix two things break 5 others... yep progress. :) yes yes I know I am venting...

Anyone else experience this and have any thoughts on how to fix these performance issues?

 

[sfatula]

There's 2 concepts when you say Spice. There is Spice in a browser, I don't use that at all myself and no idea how well it works. From what I read, not very well, lol. Then there is Spice client software which you run on another machine similar to vnc. That works beautifully. But what you have available differs by platform, so Linux has a number of Spice clients, but, IOS has 1 I think as an example and it's a paid app.