I decided to try it using my Oracle Cloud Free ARM machine to see how the deployment goes. It was surprising smooth for whole deployment experience. This post is to summarize all the steps , including how to RDP into Windows machine and how to use NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager) to add custom domain and ssl support.
Once all configuration entered, click “Deploy the container” button. Deployment will start. If you have not pull the image before, it will pull image directly from Docker Hub repository.
Access Guacamole web portal
http://<public ip>:8080
default username and password: guacadmin / guacadmin
You will be notified to create your own user name and password.
Access Linux Machines
RDP to access xRDP desktop
1. Username and Password
2. Private key
Private key in Guacamole connection’s parameters page will need PEM format file, which is not puttygen generated private key file.
We are able to convert PPK format private key to PEM format using Puttygen this tool. Using Puttygen to load your PPK format private key file, then choose menu Conversions -> Export OpenSSH key to export to a PEM format private key file.
Access Windows Machines
When using Guacamole to access Windows server machine 2016, all seems fine But common issue when trying to use Guacamole to connect to Windows server 2022 machine with default settings like this:
You will get following error message:
“The remote desktop server is currently unreachable. If the problem persists, please notify your system administrator, or check your system logs.”
If your username or password is wrong, you will get following error message.
“Log in failed. Please reconnect and try again.”
Even we checked “Ignore server certificate”, we might still get an error message to say server is unreachable.
Guacamole apparently doesn’t work with Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 RDP naturally so you have to edit the registry to make it work.
If there is any issue happening after you run your Guacamole for a while, you might want to duplicate / edit your current container to create a exactly new one.
Before you do that, make sure you stopped the existing Guacamole container.
I did met an issue after running it for a couple of weeks, something relating to “Bad gateway”. Guacamole web GUI could not load.