vncserver won't start on CentOS 5

CentOS/RHEL has a vncserver script which is configured to start instances for users specified in /etc/sysconfig/vncservers. The format is documented in the comments in that file.

I copied this from a host that I was making a copy of, ran /etc/init.d/vncserver start and it failed. Running the script again with sh -vx /etc/init.d/vncserver start showed me that it was failing on the first user at this line:

runuser -l ${USER} -c "cd ~${USER} && [ -f .vnc/passwd ] && vncserver :${DISP} ${VNCUSERARGS}"

Of course! I had forgotten to copy the .vnc/passwd file for each user across so the servers were failing to start. If this is a new machine, then you need to create passwords for each user first. It's a pity that the script doesn't inform you what really happened.

As an aside, I modified this line:

[ "$RETVAL" -ne 0 ] && break

to:

[ "$RETVAL" -ne 0 ] && echo "Warning: ${USER}:${DISP} not started"

so that the script would not die at the first user that caused an error.

But the script is not very sophisticated and doesn't allow for example starting VNC for a single user that you've added to the configuration.