Start/Stop/Restart individual vnc servers defined in /etc/sysconfig?

Question

I have inherited responsibility for a RHEL 5 development box we are using at work that has been configured using a VNC server to allow multiple users to work on the machine at once.

The VNC service seems to have been configured along the lines of this post http://it.megocollector.com/?p=1300 so that it runs at boot and creates a set of predifened user desktops specified in /etc/sysconfig, great! However, occasionally it is necessary to add a new user, or start/stop/restart the service for an existing user. At the moment the only way we can do this is to start/stop/restart the VNCservice for all users, how can I do this for just the user in question?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There is a session number for each user which is config in /etc/sysconfig/vncserver, for example:

VNCSERVERS="2:quanta"

You can use this number to start, stop a separate vnc session, something like this:

vncserver :2
vncserver -kill :2

---

Edit

You can custom the init script to make it can start a separate session, something as belows:

function start() {
    SESSION=$1
    ...
    vncserver :${SESSION} ${VNCSERVERARGS[${SESSION}]}
}

And in the start) of case statement, you can check the number of parameters to decide whether starting all or individual session:

if [ -n "$2" ]; then
    start $2
else
    for display in ${VNCSERVERS}
    do
        start $display
    done
fi