VNC Connection

You can connect to a probe via VNC to see what the browser does, and to troubleshoot issues that are only visible in the browser. This requires a permanent virtual display.

Starting the VNC Server

Native Execution

The script run_vnc_server.sh in ~/surfmeter launches a temporary VNC server. It needs a VNC server capable of showing X displays, and a password, which you only have to create once:

sudo apt update -qq && sudo apt install -y tigervnc-scraping-server
tigervncpasswd
~/surfmeter/run_vnc_server.sh

The server listens on port 5123. To use a different port, set the environment variable VNCPORT.

Docker

Set the SURFMETER_ENABLE_VNC environment variable to 1 in your docker-compose.yml file, and restart the container:

services:
  surfmeter:
    # ...
    environment:
      # ...
      SURFMETER_ENABLE_VNC: "1"

Connecting to the VNC Server

Connect with any VNC client to vnc://<host>:5123, or vnc://localhost:5123 if it runs on the same machine, or through an SSH tunnel.

Keep VNC off the public internet

Do not make port 5123 available on the internet. In Docker, the default VNC password is surfmeter.