Description of problem: By default, virt-install sets up vnc to listen on localhost only (which is good for security obviously). However, this makes it very difficult to perform interactive installs over ssh, because connecting over vnc is not possible without first destroying the vm and editing the config to change the listen address. This also has the side effect of forcing us to specify a cdrom drive or iso image as the boot media in the config file, as using -c or --location with virt-install only works on the initial boot. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Create a virtual machine with virt-install over ssh, installing from iso medium or similar and enabling vnc. Steps to Reproduce: 1. connect to host via ssh 2. run virt-install with -vnc switch 3. try to connect to host:display from another machine in the network Actual results: connection refused Expected results: connection not refused Additional info: This issue is personally annoying to me, but I rated it low because it is a feature request and not a bug.
I'm silly, under "How reproducable" it should say "consistent". ;-)
For one thing, virt-viewer and virt-manager know how to tunnel VNC over an ssh connection, so having listen=localhost doesn't impact getting remote VNC access. Just try it with a remote VM with listen=127.0.0.1: virt-viewer --connect qemu+ssh://root@$remotehost/system $vmname Additionally, virt-install does allow specifying a manual vnc listen address, just use --graphics vnc,listen=$listenip If you are using an old virt-install, there is also the --vnclisten option. So I think this is NOTABUG