[Ovirt-devel] virt-viewer plugin integration issues

[Perry N. Myers]

Looking for some design advice from you guys.  Here's the situation.

We want to be able to run virt-viewer to connect to oVirt Node guests from 
hosts that are not part of the kerberos infrastructure.  From my looking 
around it seems we have the following options:

1. enable digest-md5 as an auth mech and do user/pass auth and setup a
    simple service account just for virt-viewer (using qemu+tcp connect
    method)
2. use qemu+ssh to connect to libvirt on the Node

1 doesn't seem to work presently since virt-viewer won't prompt you for 
user/password if digest-md5 is a valid auth method (is that because 
virConnectOpenReadOnly is used instead of virConnectOpenAuth?)  And even 
if it were modified to prompt for a password that would happen on a shell 
which may not exist if you're launching firefox from a desktop icon.  We'd 
need a graphical prompt for the user/pass or the ability to pass the 
password as part of the uri perhaps.

2 is problematic since we'd have to set up ssh keys at build time and 
distribute them as part of the appliance.  Key management that we've been 
trying to avoid with all of this.

Either of you have any suggestions on where we should go with this.  Short 
term we need a solution (even if it is slightly hackish) just to make the 
console work.  Longer term we need something more secure.

Dan you mentioned just falling back and using straight vnc plugin since we 
don't need the vnc port lookup since oVirt Server has that info.  That 
doesn't work for when Node is in standalone mode with no server...  And 
besides in standalone mode libvirt has to do digest-md5 since we have no 
kerberos infrastructure in that mode.

Speaking of that... Alan, for your standalone Node patches we need to 
switch libvirt from gssapi to digest-md5 and create an account for people 
to use...  that account creation should be part of the Node first-boot 
configuration TUI probably (along with setting the root passwd).

Perry

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