Ad-hoc Connections

The quickconnect extension provides a connection bar on the Guacamole Client home page that allows users to type in the URI of a server to which they want to connect and the client will parse the URI and immediately establish the connection. The purpose of the extension is to allow situations where administrators want to allow users the flexibility of establishing their own connections without having to grant them access to edit connections or even to have to create the connections at all, aside from typing the URI.

Important

There are several implications of using this extension that should be well-understood by administrators prior to implementing it:

Connections established with this extension are created in-memory and only persist until the Guacamole session ends.
Connections created with this extension are not accessible to other users, and cannot be shared with other users.
This extension provides no functionality for authenticating users - it does not allow anonymous logins, and requires that users are successfully authenticated by another authentication module before it can be used.
The extension provides users the ability not only to establish connections, but also to set any of the parameters for a connection. There are security implications for this - for example, RDP file sharing can be used to pass through any directory available on the server running guacd to the remote desktop. This should be taken into consideration when enabling this extension and making sure that guacd is configured in a way that does not compromise sensitive system files by allowing access to them.

Downloading the quickconnect extension

The quickconnect extension is available separately from the main guacamole.war. The link for this and all other officially-supported and compatible extensions for a particular version of Guacamole are provided in the release notes for that version. You can find the release notes for current versions of Guacamole here: http://guacamole.apache.org/releases/.

The quickconnect extension is packaged as a .tar.gz file containing only the extension itself, guacamole-auth-quickconnect-1.5.4.jar, which must ultimately be placed in GUACAMOLE_HOME/extensions.

Installing the quickconnect extension

Guacamole extensions are self-contained .jar files which are located within the GUACAMOLE_HOME/extensions directory. If you are unsure where GUACAMOLE_HOME is located on your system, please consult Configuring Guacamole before proceeding.

To install the extension, you must:

Create the GUACAMOLE_HOME/extensions directory, if it does not already exist.
Place the guacamole-auth-quickconnect-1.5.4.jar file in the GUACAMOLE_HOME/extensions directory.

Configuring Guacamole for the quickconnect extension

The quickconnect extension has two configuration properties that allow for controlling what connection parameters can be used in the URIs that are opened with the quickconnect extension:

quickconnect-allowed-parameters: An optional list of parameters that are allowed to be used by connections that are created and accessed via the quickconnect extension. If this property is present, only parameters in this list will be allowed. If this property is absent, any/all parameters will be allowed unless explicitly denied using the quickconnect-denied-parameters property.
quickconnect-denied-parameters: An optional list of parameters that are explicitly denied from being used by connections created and accessed via the quickconnect extension. If this property is present, any parameters in this list will be removed from the connection configuration when it is created, even if those parameter are listed above in the quickconnect-allowed-parameters property. If this property is not present, no connection parameters will be explicitly denied.

Completing the installation

Guacamole will only load newly-installed extensions during startup, so your servlet container will need to be restarted before the quickconnect extension can be used. Doing this will disconnect all active users, so be sure that it is safe to do so prior to attempting installation. When ready, restart your servlet container and give the extension a try.

Using the quickconnect extension

The quickconnect extension provides a field on the home page that allows you to enter a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to create a connection. A URI is in the form:

protocol://username:password@host:port/?parameters

The protocol field can have any of the protocols supported by Guacamole, as documented in Configuring Guacamole. Many of the protocols define a default port value, with the exception of VNC. The parameters field can specify any of the protocol-specific parameters as documented on the configuration page.

To establish a connection, simply type in a valid URI and either press “Enter” or click the connect button. This extension will parse the URI and create a new connection, and immediately start that connection in the current browser.

Here are a few examples of URIs:

ssh://linux1.example.com/: Connect to the server linux1.example.com using the SSH protocol on the default SSH port (22). This will result in prompting for both username and password.
vnc://linux1.example.com:5900/: Connect to the server linux1.example.com using the VNC protocol and specifying the port as 5900.
rdp://localuser@windows1.example.com/?security=rdp&ignore-cert=true&disable-audio=true&enable-drive=true&drive-path=/mnt/usb: Connect to the server windows1.example.com using the RDP protocol and the user “localuser”. This URI also specifies several RDP-specific parameters on the connection, including forcing security mode to RDP (security=rdp), ignoring any certificate errors (ignore-cert=true), disabling audio pass-through (disable-audio=true), and enabling filesystem redirection (enable-drive=true) to the /mnt/usb folder on the system running guacd (drive-path=/mnt/usb).