Gnome Terminal Profile Export

I usually run screen on a remote server in PROD environment. Whenever I want to access the server, I SSH to that host, and run screen -D -R to resume the session I leave before. Using screen, you don’t have to worry about your SSH session suddenly goes down due to the Internet connection issue.

I also adjust the terminal running the SSH connection with a title and special color scheme so that I can quickly tell this is a PROD environment and need to be careful.

I create a Gnome terminal profile so that I only need to click “File” -> “Open Terminal” -> “prod-env”. “prod-env” is the profile name with all customized attributes:

• Title
• Terminal window size
• Automatically run a command ssh -t <host> screen -D -R
• Specified color-scheme

How can I share the profile among the multiple environments, e.g., a laptop and a desktop running Gnome environment? Of course, I can set it manually on both of machines. It would be better if I can export the profile and import it on other machines.

It is actually pretty simple. The following command works on CentOS 7.3 and Gnome 3.

• Export

  dconf dump /org/gnome/terminal/ > /tmp/terminal-profile.dconf
  

• Import

  cat /tmp/terminal-profile.dconf | dconf load
  

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VNC Viewer

I recently built a desktop for development in my company’s CORP network. By using VNC, I can access the same Gnome session even from home. Just simply connect to VPN, and start a vnc viewer, I can resume what I do at office.

I have a CentOS 6 on my development desktop. I installed RPM pacakages: vnc-server. (TODO: Details about setting up VNC server.)

I tried TigerVNC Viewer, but it was really bad, especially F8 menu key because I use Eclipse, F8 is used a lot when you are debugging. And there is not a pop-up menu bar like VirtualBox when you are in full-screen mode.

RealVNC satisfies all my requirements about VNC:

• A menu bar
• Better configuration UI on Windows 7
• I can write a script to start VNC viewer
  through SSH tunnel make the viewer goes into full-screen mode on my secondary display automatically.

In CORP network, just click the VNC button on Windows’ taskbard, type the password, the viewer is in full-screen mode on my secondary display.

#!/bin/bash
set -e

shutdown() {
  if [ -n "$tunnel_pid" ]; then
    kill $tunnel_pid
  fi
}

trap shutdown EXIT

ssh -N -L 5902:localhost:5902 mydev.desktop &
tunnel_pid=$!

~/apps/bin/VNC-Viewer-5.2.1-Windows-64bit.exe \
  --Monitor='\\.\Display2' \
  --FullScreen=1 \
  localhost:2

I also installed cygwin on Windows so that I could use OpenSSH. The script can clean up the SSH tunnel once the script quits.

At home, the network connection is slow. And that script will fail because RealVNC gets timeout. I didn’t find how to make RealVNC wait for a longer time. I just simply run SSH tunnel and viewer separately in different screens of GNU Screen in a Cygwin terminal.

I chose JPEG encode for better performance when I at home.

Here is the script using SSH Control Socket to stop the tunnel. %h is a TOKEN of SSH, which will be substituted with the host name SSH tries to access. Check ControlPath of ssh-config.

#!/bin/bash
set -e

SSH_HOST=bwang.desktop.mycompany.com
CTL_SOCK=/tmp/ssh_tunnel_%h.sock

shutdown() {
    ssh -S $CTL_SOCK -O stop $SSH_HOST
}

trap shutdown EXIT

ssh -f -N -L 5902:localhost:5902 -M -S $CTL_SOCK -o ExitOnForwardFailure=yes $SSH_HOST

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    /Applications/RealVNC/VNC\ Viewer.app/Contents/MacOS/vncviewer \
          -useaddressbook    $SSH_HOST
else
    echo "Failed to start SSH tunnel!"
fi

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