Server session disappearing due to signal?

Community Support
1

I have been looking at thinlinc to connect to a VM with XFCE and it works. It’s just that randomly after seemingly longer intervals (think days) the server side session just gets killed. Until that time, connecting and disconnecting repeatedly is always fine.

xinit.log for the disappearing session at the end just shows without any timestamp:

tl-xinit: Caught signal, terminating
tl-xinit: Terminating X client...
tl-xinit: Terminating X server...

[...]

Is there a way to make this log verbose to figure out which signal appears to be killing the session and when this happened? tl-xinit seems to be sensitive to something that did not ever affect x2go for example and I have a hard time narrowing this down. What could it be?

Thank you!

2

Hi @hwrobel,

Good question - the only time ThinLinc should be ending sessions unattended is if you’ve set, for example, MaxIdleTime or MaxDisconnectionTime. See:

If you haven’t set these, then presumably something at OS-level is ending the session for you.

Which distribution are you running on? Is there anything in the system logs to indicate what might be happening?

3

This is on RHEL 8.10. It appears that tlwebadm wants info every 5 mins and that something or someone is triggering tlwebadm at about the time ~03:10 of the last unexpected session kill with much more activity suddenly, according to journalctl.

Jul 19 03:00:01 [...].com systemd[1]: Starting Collection of license statistics for ThinLinc Web Administration...
Jul 19 03:00:01 [...].com systemd[1]: Starting system activity accounting tool...
Jul 19 03:00:01 [...].com systemd[1]: sysstat-collect.service: Succeeded.
Jul 19 03:00:01 [...].com systemd[1]: Started system activity accounting tool.
Jul 19 03:00:01 [...].com systemd[1]: tl-license-stats.service: Succeeded.
Jul 19 03:00:01 [...].com systemd[1]: Started Collection of license statistics for ThinLinc Web Administration.
[...]
Jul 19 03:05:04 [...].com systemd[1]: Starting Collection of license statistics for ThinLinc Web Administration...
Jul 19 03:05:04 [...].com systemd[1]: tl-license-stats.service: Succeeded.
Jul 19 03:05:04 [...].com systemd[1]: Started Collection of license statistics for ThinLinc Web Administration.
[...]
Jul 19 03:10:01 [...].com systemd[1]: Starting Collection of license statistics for ThinLinc Web Administration...
Jul 19 03:10:01 [...].com systemd[1]: Starting system activity accounting tool...
Jul 19 03:10:01 [...].com systemd[1]: Stopping ThinLinc Web Administration...
Jul 19 03:10:01 [...].com systemd[1]: sysstat-collect.service: Succeeded.
Jul 19 03:10:01 [...].com systemd[1]: Started system activity accounting tool.
Jul 19 03:10:01 [...].com systemd[1]: tl-license-stats.service: Succeeded.
Jul 19 03:10:01 [...].com systemd[1]: Started Collection of license statistics for ThinLinc Web Administration.
[...]
Jul 19 03:10:05 [...].com systemd[1]: tlwebadm.service: Succeeded.
Jul 19 03:10:05 [...].com systemd[1]: Stopped ThinLinc Web Administration.
Jul 19 03:10:05 [...].com systemd[1]: Starting ThinLinc Web Administration...
Jul 19 03:10:06 [...].com systemd[1]: Started ThinLinc Web Administration.
Jul 19 03:10:06 [...].com systemd[1]: Stopping ThinLinc VSM agent...
Jul 19 03:10:06 [...].com systemd[1]: home-[...]-.gvfs.mount: Succeeded.
Jul 19 03:10:06 [...].com systemd[1]: var-opt-thinlinc-sessions-[...]-10-drives-l.mount: Succeeded.
Jul 19 03:10:08 [...].com systemd[1]: vsmagent.service: Succeeded.
Jul 19 03:10:08 [...].com systemd[1]: Stopped ThinLinc VSM agent.
Jul 19 03:10:08 [...].com systemd[1]: Starting ThinLinc VSM agent...
Jul 19 03:10:08 [...].com systemd[1]: Started ThinLinc VSM agent.
Jul 19 03:10:08 [...].com systemd[1]: Stopping ThinLinc VSM server...
Jul 19 03:10:09 [...].com systemd[1]: vsmserver.service: Succeeded.
Jul 19 03:10:09 [...].com systemd[1]: Stopped ThinLinc VSM server.
Jul 19 03:10:09 [...].com systemd[1]: Starting ThinLinc VSM server...
Jul 19 03:10:09 [...].com systemd[1]: Started ThinLinc VSM server.
Jul 19 03:10:09 [...].com systemd[1]: Stopping ThinLinc Web Access...
Jul 19 03:10:12 [...].com systemd[1]: tlwebaccess.service: Succeeded.
Jul 19 03:10:12 [...].com systemd[1]: Stopped ThinLinc Web Access.
Jul 19 03:10:12 [...].com systemd[1]: Starting ThinLinc Web Access...
Jul 19 03:10:12 [...].com systemd[1]: Started ThinLinc Web Access.

Given that no one should have the password, I am not using that tool, and that 3AM is not a good time to maintain a system, in theory tlwebadm shouldn’t be able to kill the session. The tlwebadm.log didn’t show anything that would suggest any specific action or any login attempts.

Nevertheless, I have now used systemctl to stop and disable the tlwebadm service. Now I’ll wait for a number of days to see if the current sessions gets killed again.

Thanks for nudging me into this direction.

4

The web administration service will update the license count every 5 minutes, that’s normal behaviour. The other system services restarting like that is a bit strange, though. Is it possible that you have some cron job or automated script which is doing this every few days?