vncviewer fails to connect after applying latest RHEL5 maintenance
 

Hi All,

I've been running vnc-server on RHEL 5 using xinetd for a few years now. Not really ever had to re-visit this until now.

Now when I connect from a vncviewer, e.g. tigervnc, RealVNC, or tightVNC, the connection never establishes. I have attempted to run vncviewer from bash on the affected server; Here is what gets returned:

[root@server ~]# vncviewer localhost:5901

VNC Viewer Free Edition 4.1.2 for X - built Jan 31 2011 05:03:21
Copyright (C) 2002-2005 RealVNC Ltd.
See http://www.realvnc.com for information on VNC.

Wed Aug 15 10:48:07 2012
CConn: connected to host localhost port 5901
main: End of stream
[root@server ~]

I have this same configuration working on 60 other servers without a problem, but 2 of the RHEL 5 servers that I brought up to current maintenance now give me the above symptoms. No VNC terminal ever gets displayed.

Any ideas?

VNC should log to the users home directory by default, is there anything reporting in the log files of the user that is attempting to establish the connection? Also checking your messages file might report something. There really isn't anything helpful from the output above.

When I run the vncviewer command from the bash, I get the messages described earlier. Here is also what is in /var/log/messages:

...
Aug 15 12:16:06 server xinetd[8075]: START: vnc1280 pid=16579 from=127.0.0.1
Aug 15 12:16:06 server xinetd[8075]: EXIT: vnc1280 status=1 pid=16579 duration=0(sec)
...

I see no logging in the home directory.

Permissions on /etc/nsswitch.conf were set to -rw-------

SOLUTION:

Changed permissions on /etc/nsswitch.conf to -rw-r--r--