While testing the ability to have slaves start and stop automatically based on job demand, I ran in to an issue. I configured the slave to use JNLP for launching the slave app, but I was unable to find anywhere that I could download the needed JNLP file, or even get the command line to use (which is normally shown when you configure a dumb slave to use JNLP). As a result, I was unable to figure out the proper way to launch the slave from either JNLP, or the command line.

I believe I saw a similar bug to this at one point, where the person was told to just use SSH. However, that doesn't work for me because I am using the VMs to run tests on the app we are developing. As part of running those tests, they need to be run from a terminal with a desktop in order to have access to the necessary parts of the OS. (For example, with D-Bus, there are lots of things you can't do unless you are using a desktop session. There are some hacks to let you do some of those things over SSH, but there are still some things you just can't do.)

In the past, I could have figured out the command line by setting up a fake "dumb slave" and using the command line shown with a few tweaks to make it work. However, newer versions of Jenkins seem to use a shared key that is specific to the slave node, so this is no longer an option.

Thanks!