Bug 811346

Spice requires multiple channels to do its thing, which means opening multiple SSH tunnels. If you want to use remote spice, you really should be using ssh keys.

That said maybe we can serialize how these are opened so that multiple dialogs don't jump up at once.

So serializing this isn't as simple as I thought. I think the only way forward here is for us to use a library like libssh2 to try and fix this stuff once and for all. However that's not an easy bit of work so won't make the next release.

In the interim, I'd recommend setting up SSH keys to avoid the dialogs all together, or use ssh connection sharing like described here:

http://fermiparadox.wordpress.com/2008/06/19/ssh-connection-sharing/

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I figured out a way to fix this upstream:

https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/virt-manager.git/commit/?id=5bf63759b6c18f4b814b52d8ed671fbb428af1f8

But it's not really backportable, moving to F20 where we will rebase in the fix.

virt-manager-0.10.0-3.gita2e52067.fc20 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 20.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/virt-manager-0.10.0-3.gita2e52067.fc20

Package virt-manager-0.10.0-3.gita2e52067.fc20:
* should fix your issue,
* was pushed to the Fedora 20 testing repository,
* should be available at your local mirror within two days.
Update it with:
# su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing virt-manager-0.10.0-3.gita2e52067.fc20'
as soon as you are able to.
Please go to the following url:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2013-17628/virt-manager-0.10.0-3.gita2e52067.fc20
then log in and leave karma (feedback).

virt-manager-0.10.0-3.gita2e52067.fc20 has been pushed to the Fedora 20 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

I'm on Fedora 20 and I still have the issue. I have to type my ssh password 4 times to open the remote display.

$ rpm -qi virt-manager
Name        : virt-manager
Version     : 1.0.0
Release     : 6.fc20
Architecture: noarch
Install Date: Tue 25 Mar 2014 10:12:05 AM CET
Group       : Applications/Emulators
Size        : 3687809
License     : GPLv2+
Signature   : RSA/SHA256, Tue 11 Mar 2014 07:12:37 PM CET, Key ID 2eb161fa246110c1
Source RPM  : virt-manager-1.0.0-6.fc20.src.rpm
Build Date  : Mon 10 Mar 2014 02:58:38 PM CET
Build Host  : arm02-builder09.arm.fedoraproject.org
Relocations : (not relocatable)
Packager    : Fedora Project
Vendor      : Fedora Project
URL         : http://virt-manager.org/
Summary     : Virtual Machine Manager
Description :
Virtual Machine Manager provides a graphical tool for administering virtual
machines for KVM, Xen, and LXC. Start, stop, add or remove virtual devices,
connect to a graphical or serial console, and see resource usage statistics
for existing VMs on local or remote machines. Uses libvirt as the backend

The original report was that all the dialogs were opened at the same time, overlapping and causing weird X errors since they all want to own focus. The root issue that spice requires multiple channels is not 'fixed' and doesn't have a clear solution. You can probably work around this on your machine, google 'ssh connection sharing'

Thanks for you comment. I hadn't understood well that the root cause was not the subject of this bug report but it's side-effect.

May I suggest that if the solution is the ssh connection sharing, why don't implement it in virt-manager? It is only a matter of option when initializing the first connection to the remote host. Every ssh connection configured in virt-manager would have the connection sharing enabled even if they don't use it later (because they doesn't use spice but VNC for example).

connection sharing has its caveats, so if we implemented it we'd need to allow users to turn it off, so more UI, more code paths to test.

If we are going to mess with this code, it would be to consider switching to an ssh library that should hopefully solve this problem.

Until then, the recommended usage in this scenario is to set up ssh keys, it's pretty easy:

ssh-keygen
ssh-copy-id user@host