Can't enable screen sharing in GNOME

[tuxaholic]

Hi all,

Past few days, I’ve been unable to enable screen sharing. I flip the switch for “Remote Desktop” in settings to the on position and nothing happens.

If I exit the settings screen and re-enter it, the switch is again in the off position (as if I never turned it on):

The only message I see in a window running journalctl -f is related to a non-existent certificate:

Sep 06 16:58:43 ironyman gnome-control-c[6539]: Configured TLS certificate invalid: Failed to open file “/var/tmp/rdptls/ironyman.crt”: No such file or directory

Listing the contents confirms this file is missing:

[root@ironyman ~]# ls /var/tmp/rdptls/
ls: cannot access '/var/tmp/rdptls/': No such file or directory

This seems to be a temporary certificate that should be auto-generated. Why is it suddenly missing from my system? Not saying the reason remote desktop does not turn on is this, but seem to be the only clue…

What else can I do to investigate / fix this?

EDIT: these are the packages I am using:

$ yay -Qe | grep gnome
gnome-backgrounds 44.0-1
gnome-builder 44.2-5
gnome-connections 44.1-2
gnome-control-center 44.3-1
gnome-disk-utility 44.0-1
gnome-keyring 1:42.1-3
gnome-nettool 42.0-2
gnome-power-manager 43.0-1
gnome-randr 0.0.1-4
gnome-remote-desktop 44.2-1
gnome-screenshot 41.0+r25+g45f08f0-1
gnome-shell 1:44.4-1
gnome-themes-extra 3.28+r6+g45b1d457-1
gnome-tweaks 42beta+r14+g2d9d76c-3
gnome-usage 3.38.1-2

[tuxaholic]

Ok I’ve figured it out by reading this post on setting up remote desktop.

I don’t know how I got into this mess but I used dconf to review the TLS info as mentioned in that link:

$ dconf read /org/gnome/desktop/remote-desktop/rdp/tls-key
'/var/tmp/rdptls/ironyman.key'
$ dconf read /org/gnome/desktop/remote-desktop/rdp/tls-cert
'/var/tmp/rdptls/ironyman.crt'

So I reset the contents using:

$ dconf reset /org/gnome/desktop/remote-desktop/rdp/tls-cert
$ dconf reset /org/gnome/desktop/remote-desktop/rdp/tls-key
$ dconf read /org/gnome/desktop/remote-desktop/rdp/tls-cert
$ dconf read /org/gnome/desktop/remote-desktop/rdp/tls-key

After doing this, flipping the switch started working again (I can connect using an RDP client and the switch remains on).

I don’t know how I got into this situation, but if anyone ever has this issue consider reseting the TLS certificate configuration so that GNOME reverts to whatever it defaults to. At least this seems to have fixed it for me…

[tuxaholic]

One last note: after the configuration reset, when I turned sharing on, I now get these new locations for the TLS data:

$ dconf read /org/gnome/desktop/remote-desktop/rdp/tls-cert
'/home/user/.local/share/gnome-remote-desktop/rdp-tls.crt'

$ dconf read /org/gnome/desktop/remote-desktop/rdp/tls-key
'/home/user/.local/share/gnome-remote-desktop/rdp-tls.key'

So everything seems to indicate that somehow I changed this to an incorrect value in my system (not sure what I ran / installed to do this), causing the service to fail to start (due to the missing certificate).