Table of Contents
RustDesk Server on Devuan
Warning. I am still editing this on 18 Sep 2025. Do not use these instructions until I have finished editing, then tested the procedure. This notice will be removed at that time.
We use Devuan as an alternative to Debian as Devuan allows us to choose the init system instead of forcing the use of SystemD. With its many faults, we still choose SysVInit for our init system, and Devuan allows that.
The Rust Server install script unfortunately assumes SystemD, and will fail halfway through as it is attempting to set up the SystemD service. The same is true of the .deb package which is available.
This article describes how to set up the Rust Server on Devuan, and may be helpful for other systems also.
Set up user
Rust Server does not require any special privileges, so creating a separate user account instead of running as root greatly enhances security. The following few lines assume we will install rust in /opt/rustdesk, and the log files will be stored in /var/log/rustdesk/*, and a system user named rust
- setupRustDeskServer
#! /usr/bin/env sh useradd --shell /usr/sbin/nologin --system --user-group --home-dir /opt/rustdesk rust mkdir /opt/rustdesk mkdir /var/log/rustdesk chown rust:rust /opt/rustdesk chown rust:rust /var/log/rustdesk
Download Server
Open a web browser to https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk-server/releases, locate the entry for rustdesk-server-linux-amd64.zip. Right click on it and select “Copy Link”.
cd /tmp wget ###Paste the URL from above here### unzip rustdesk-server-linux-amd64.zip mv /tmp/amd64/* /opt/rustdesk chown rust:rust /opt/rustdesk/*
This will create three binary files in /opt/rustdesk
- hbbr - The relay server. If a direct P2P connection can not be made, this will be used to relay traffic between clients.
- hbbs - this is the “signal” server. Your clients will ping this to notify they exist, and will use it to set up a connection between clients.
- rustdesk-utils - a utility program that can generate/verify key pairs, and also run some basic tests on your service
Run for first time
The first time you run the signal server (hbbs), it will note that the key pair used for authentication does not exist and generate them. These keys are stored in the files:
- id_ed25519 - the private key
- id_ed25519.pub - the public key required by any client wanting to connect to this server
Note: The check is made in the current working directory, so you must run hbbs from within it's home directory (/opt/rustdesk)