ThinLinc Demo Instance

This is a docker based instance of ThinLinc. Running under docker its default behavior is to suffer from complete amnesia after each restart. As such it requires some minimal configuration after startup to accept your logins.

It's a modified version of https://github.com/oposs/tl-docker/ specifically for Rocky 9.

Startup

First you have to install docker. If you are running ubuntu, docker will be available as a package for installation. If you are on windows or macos you can go to docker.com to download docker for your os. If you are on RedHat, install podman-docker to get a docker compatible cli for podman.

Normally a docker image will run a single application. Often only a single process. In order to demo ThinLinc we get docker to run an entire linux system for us. For this to work, docker needs to run in --privileged mode.

The ThinLinc client uses html to communicate with its server, with the --publish option you map the html port of the ThinLinc demo server to a port, accessible from the outside. Keep the docker attached to the terminal -t to see all the messages it outputs to the console.

docker build --tag tl-rocky:latest .
docker run -d --privileged --name tl-rocky --publish 300:300 --cgroupns=host --tmpfs /tmp --tmpfs /run  -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup tl-rocky:latest

Alternatively, you can also use docker compose to start the container. An example docker compose script is also in the repository.

docker compose -f thinlinc-rocky.yaml up -d

Configuration

Before you can login, the ThinLinc server requires some minimal configuration

First add a user account. Either with a password

docker exec tl-rocky tlcfg add-user myuser mypassword

Seeing that this thinlinc instance is made available over the internet via https you might your own certificates. (self signed are available by default) You can also use the volume mounts for these certificates as can be seen by the example in the docker compose file. (thinlinc-rocky.yaml)

docker cp mydomain.com.crt tl-rocky:/opt/thinlinc/etc/tlwebaccess/server.crt
docker cp mydomain.com.key tl-rocky:/opt/thinlinc/etc/tlwebaccess/server.key

Second, let the ThinLinc server know under what hostname it is reachable from the client. This is a very important step, as ThinLinc uses a load-balancing system where it will tell your client to connect to the the ThinLinc server with the lowest load in your ThinLinc cluster.

In this example we tell the ThinLinc server that it can be reached from the local machine. But you can also set the public IP or the dns name of your machine to make your demo instance available on your network.

docker exec tl-rocky tlcfg set-hostname 127.0.0.1

Cleanup

When you are done testing, you can get rid of your ThinLinc demo server very easily:

docker kill tl-rocky
docker rm tl-rocky

Note that this will also get rid of anything you have done on the ThinLinc demo server while logged in with your demo user

Debugging

If you want to have a peak inside the ThinLinc server while it is running, try this

docker exec -ti tl-rocky bash

Support

If you have questions in connection with ThinLinc in general or thinlinc-demo-in-a-docker head over to the ThinLinc Community.

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