Recipe FAQ

What is the VNC password?

The VNC password is for logging into a compute desktop. It is a personal password for preventing others from accessing your session of the compute desktop. The compute desktop is an interactive GUI environment for the Traditional High Performance Computing (THPC) and other RIS-Vetted GUI compute applications.

For example, a compute desktop will be created temporarily through running the helper script compute-gui-desktop.

To connect to the compute desktop, you need to open a browser to the url given after running the helper script. Once you see the compute desktop, click “Connect”.

../../../_images/ITDEV-14891_noVNC_connect.png

Then, the compute desktop will prompt you to enter a password.

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If the VNC password is not set before, the helper script will have created one and display it on the terminal. In the following example, the password has been created as DTLMLkbA3R0=. Then, you can use the password to login to the compute desktop.

> /scratch1/fs1/ris/application/bin/compute1-gui-desktop -G group_name

# An output example:
Created password for your noVNC web login.
Your password for noVNC is: DTLMLkbA3R0=

Please use the password below to login to the noVNC session.
If you want to pick your own password, you can simply set the environment variable VNC_PW with you own password.

Job <job_id> is submitted to queue <general-interactive>.
You can access your compute1 desktop with the url https://compute1-exec-N.ris.wustl.edu:8901.

If you are not going to reset the password, the same code will be used next time for your compute desktop connections.

If you like to set your own password or reset the password, you can assign a desired password to the ENV variable $VNC_PW before running the helper script. In the following example, the password has been set as vncpassword. Then, use the password to login to the compute desktop. The same password will be used next time for your compute desktop connections, too.

VNC_PW=vncpassword /scratch1/fs1/ris/application/bin/compute1-gui-desktop -G group_name

# An output example:
Job <job_id> is submitted to queue <general-interactive>.
You can access your compute1 desktop with the url https://compute1-exec-N.ris.wustl.edu:8901.

The VNC password is encrypted and saved under your home directory ~/.vnc/passwd with POSIX mode 600.