X2Go Session Broker Config File: x2gobroker.conf

The default version of the /etc/x2go/x2gobroker.conf configuration file can be viewed here.

It basically is used to do all global session broker configuration stuff. The file contains many and long comments, make sure you read everything thoroughly.

The file x2gobroker.conf falls into a [global] section and several per-backend sections ([zeroconf], [inifile], etc.). The file format is that of an INI file.

The tweakable options of x2gobroker.conf that you might have to touch are:

• enable/disable authentication/authorization (check-credentials)
• enable/disable available WebUIs (enable-plain-output, enable-uccs-output)

For miscellaneous setups you may be interested in adapting the following options:

• default-session-autologin: broker sessions are authoritative, clicking on a session profile card will launch the session right away without a second username/password request
• default-authorized-keys: location of the server-side authorized_keys file that is used by X2Go Session Broker to mediate session autologin
• default-agent-query-mode: mode for querying X2Go Session Broker Agent, can be either LOCAL or SSH

Available backend sections are: zeroconf, inifile. All backends have the following options in common:

• enable = {true|false}
• auth-mech = pam (can be omitted if default-auth-mech is set to the same authentication mechanism)
• user-db = libnss (can be omitted if default-user-db is set to the same user DB backend)
• group-db = libnss (can be omitted if default-group-db is set to the same group DB backend)

If you want to use a certain backend with your X2Go Session Broker setup, make sure to enable it in x2gobroker.conf. Otherwise, you will receive 404 http reponse (Not Found) for the backends broker URL.

Normally, other options are available for each backend, depending on the characteristics of the backend.

The zeroconf backend is a test backend that works out of the box and provides a session profile that will give an X2Go login to localhost.

With a default installation of x2gobroker-daemon the command to launch X2Go Client in broker mode then is:

$ x2goclient --broker-url=http://localhost:8080/plain/zeroconf/

In /etc/x2go/x2gobroker.conf the only option you can tweak is the desktop-shell option. Its default is set to KDE.

The inifile backend is a broker backend that can be used to configure several X2Go Server provisionings text file based. For the session profile setup it uses an extra file, by default it is using…

$ editor /etc/x2go/broker/x2gobroker-sessionprofiles.conf

If your x2gobroker-sessionprofiles.conf is located elsewhere, use the this inifile backend's option (in x2gobroker.conf) to select another file path:

[inifile]
...
session-profiles = /etc/x2go/broker/x2gobroker-sessionprofiles.conf
...

The default version of the x2gobroker-sessionprofiles.conf file ships many examples, but is not usable out-of-the box. An extra wiki page has been dedicated to that file.