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The State of Remote Desktops?
frenchgates writes "It became clear to me (when my main machine had to be sent away for repairs for a week) that it's high time to finally divorce myself from any particular computer by using data and software accessible from any internet connected computer as much as possible. I'm talking Visual IDEs, productivity apps, powerful, easy to use email client, etc, all presented to me consistently from computer to computer on my remote virtual desktop. Is anyone seriously trying this? What are the best practices and best applications? What are the biggest shortcomings? What if I limit my demand to "accessible from any internet connected Windows machine with Java installed?" Are there good web sites devoted to this noble goal?"
vnc is suppossed to be good and it works for free. I know Norton also sells Remote Desktop but I have never used that. For big companies, Tarantella kicks ass!
Windows Terminal Server does this. There are companies that will host Terminal Services from their site and you can access them from anywhere.
Are you talking about thin client or remote desktop access? VNC does pretty much what you're looking to do. One computer, one set of data, accesible from anywhere depedning on how you set it up. I believe there's also a jav version that you could easily run off an Apache server.
Otherwise check out www.ltsp.org for terminal services/thin client options.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
TightVNC is available here.
Apple has their Apple Remote Desktop now, which is apparently pretty damn cool
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
It's not free but it has windows and Java clients, it gets around firewalls pretty well and aparently has really good compression/speed.
gotomypc.com
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
Are you still in control of the system hosting the remote desktop? Is there truly an expected higher reliability factor involved with that server? You need to carefully consider this question, as it may be the case that you are only buying yourself an imagined higher level of reliability.
If you can justify your assumption, then it depends on platform.
Under Unix systems, two very good tools come into play. screen provides very good abstraction for text based applications from controlling ptys. Now for X stuff, you are pretty much stuck with something like VNC. VNC is kinda bandwidth heavy, but tightVNC (wwww.tightvnc.com) really helps with low bandwidth. VNC is a recommendation *only* if you need guaranteed persistence of apps, even if the client machine crashes or you need to relocate and cannot afford to close the App. If you just need to pull up the apps as you need them, native X11 can be used pretty much from any client. From Windows you can use either Exceed or WeirdX (free), and you have remote access, but if your client machines goes haywire, so does your app. In this way, vnc could be considered analogous to X11 in the way screen in analogous to ssh or telnet, they both prevent client problems from destroying control or output of an application.
Now under Windows, Terminal Services can be used to fill this role. Your client disconnects and you can resume with another right where the screen left off. You might be able to get Citrix to do that as well, but my experience with Citrix has been more about providing X11-type functionality as opposed to VNC type reliability. VNC also works with Windows, but Terminal Services is a much more lightweight beast.
All this said, I personally use VNC on a Unix system for long term graphical applications. That way if I need to reboot my desktop for some reason, the VNC sessions and the various screen controlled terminals will be available for pickup at my next convenience.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I find it hard to believe that so many people have made suggestions involving Windows and so few of these people seem to grasp the concept of an X-terminal or VNC or LTSP. Unix has been doing this with console and X-Windows for probably over 15 years now, come on, get a clue people! I personally use I-openers running off an LTSP server, and Another friend uses old 486 boxen as clients to an LTSP server. X-terminals work beautifully as well and can be had off ebay for $20. Honestly, paying for Windows Terminal Server?
The Linux Terminal Server Project is exactly what you're talking about. I've been using it at home here to play around with for a few months now. It's really slick. I have a bunch of my old computers that would otherwise be in the dumpster that are right now serving as terminals. And they're pretty fast, since all the apps run on my big Athlon box.
It works by netbooting from your server. Some kind of bootrom code, either on your network card or on a floppy disk, initalizes the network card. It uses DHCP to find its own IP address, and then it uses TFTP to download a small Linux kernel over the network. This loads up and uses an NFS-mounted root to run an X server on the local computer. The X server connects back to the main server by XDMCP, and you get your XDM/GDM/KDM login window.
The LTSP guys have done a great job packaging this all up. Take a look. And as for your requirement of running it on a Windows box, see Cygwin's XFree86 port to Windows. You can use it to connect with XDMCP. Of course, I don't know why you wouldn't just pop in a bootdisk...
The biggest drawback to this approach is remote access security. Look at that paragraph and how many daemons and services you need to have running. But I imagine that if it was secured well enough, it'd be fine. Actually, there is a way to make this all go over VNC (or VNC with compression). It's not as fast, but at least that's only one TCP port and a lot easier to get by firewalls.
There's a great bunch of guys working on this project. And its nice to be able to connect to #ltsp on irc.openprojects.net and get the lead developers to answer your questions.
Michael F. Robbins
I wouldn't suggest VNC -- at least for Windows. It is just _too_slow_! I mean, it's perfectly fine for doing odd jobs. But you'd never want to use it as your main user interface!
I've had good success.
Use ssh -C for heavy duty graphical apps.
Do not use it for low bandwidth stuff as it will actually slow things down.
I've run Nautilus fairly quickly over a 14KB/s connection.
Tarantella isnt cheap, but if you dont need a lot of Enterprise management functionality, they offer a stripped down version called something like the Linux Starter Pak for under 50 concurrent users, that is signficantly cheaper.
And no, I dont work for them, but I do like their product on Solaris and their tech staff seems to be very unix-saavy, even though they support Windows too.
I personally can't stand Terminal Server due to the way it handles processes. Since you aren't actually 'taking over' the machine, but instead using a sub-process, there are many things you cannot do.
For example, if IIS needs access to a database (Sybase, in my case), it will not give up control so that your Terminal Server connection can use it (if you needed to connect to it directly). Therefore you cannot access that database unless you kill it at the 'console' level. Aside from the myriad of other problems I had, this was one total show-stopper for me.
VNC is free (as in beer) and actually really fine software. I prefer it instead.
You are just using the wrong version of Windows.
It cracks me up to see people continually trying to force MS Windows to do things that Unix has been able to do with NO ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE for YEARS.
Face it people, MS doesn't get it and NEVER will. You just keep banging your head into a brick wall.
To solve your problem, you have to change your mindset. Think outside the box - the Microsoft box that is. Run everything possible in a UNIX environment, only using Windows for the last couple remaining proprietary apps that tie you to Windows (second machine, VMWare, or whatever.)
I have dreamed of this for years. I have found that the network Independence of X11 to be a HUGE advantage here but this alone does not go far enough. The core problem is where the state of the application is stored (between sessions). Most applications store this on the local filesystem. Therefore, you can go a long way to solving this problem by configuring NFS (in conjunction with NIS) to mount your user file system from a central NFS server and the problem is solved.
What would be really nice to see, is this information stored on an LDAP server so that my "preferences" could follow me around. Unfortunately, it would seem that MS is closer to this dream than Unix (most windows apps use the registry to store this information, I just don't know of any applications that will use a remote machines registry to pull the users preferences).
I have been able to make this a reality to a limited degree by:
1) Pointing all of my potential client machines to the same font server.
2) Storing all of my Address book information on the same LDAP server.
3) Using a file share that supports FTP,NFS, & SMB to store all of my files.
4) One nice thing is that Mozilla can (or at least used to) be hackable so that bookmarks are stored on a remote LDAP server. This is a good step in the right direction.
VNC, WindowsXP Remote Desktop and PC Anywhere. These programs allow you to control your actual desktop remotely, as if you we're actually there in front of it. Unfortunately the way this works is by streaming image data over the wire, this can be very slow, like when browsing the web a good deal of the data is images. For something like editing text (e.g. Word-processing) some of the programs are smart enough to just send text data, so the response time is acceptable; even over slow connections.
WindowsXP Remote Desktop is the best I've used so far, it seems to be very efficient and even allows you do 'share' your hard drives for easy copying of files, copy&paste of text works flawlessly and it also streams music that's playing on your machine.
Unfortunately VNC's and the like do not work for games, streaming video or any graphically intense application. They only work well with a broadband or LAN connection, while they will work over a slower pipe, it can be quite a painful experience.
Telnet, ssh: command line computing. Many people at slashdot will testify by it, and to be sure; once you mastered the tools they can be just as useful as their graphical counterparts. VI, gcc, and mutt can be just as productive as Word, Visual Studio and Outlook, it just takes some getting used to. However the tools can be limiting, you can't work with MSWord documents in VI, and you can't compile Win32 apps in gcc, so it depends greatly in the context of your work.
The main advantage to command line apps are there very low bandwidth requirements and portability. Machines from the 80's can support a telnet connection over a 300baud modem, so you have no need for a modern windows machine to connect to home. For some, this is more important then being able to use GUI based apps.
Web based, Client/Server. Back in the .com boom their we're some companies that we attempting to create full blown office productivity apps in HTML, and they worked pretty well. A Solid example is yahoo.com. They offer free (centralized) email w/ spell checking, notes, calendar and other stuff all from your web browser. Web apps are not as powerful as client side applications, but they are improving rapidly and will probably be better tomorrow, this is also where Microsoft and others are heading. Hailstorm (correct me if I'm wrong) is Microsoft's attempt to mix a client side application that connects to server side 'web services' to access your data. This may be exactly what your looking for, but it's not out yet.
.NET), but imagine I will within the next year or two.
I work away from my computer all the time, I use yahoo.com's email because I don't trust other domains to stay around, and I need my email if my home computer isn't working. I use WindowsXP remote desktop for when I need to do something on my desktop, and I use ssh for when I want to mess around with my linux box at home or edit my sourceforge project page. They're all good solutions but are better suited for different tasks. I haven't used anything 'webservice' like yet (except messing around with
-Jon
this is my sig.
> Of course EVERYTHING is harder on Microsoft's
> platform
* Remote profiles have been around for a long
time.
* WinXP desktop sharing is great for the use the
OP is talking about.
* WinVNC works just fine.
It's not *too* difficult to get something like this working. I've got my machine at home set to do it now. You need to put in a line like:
/etc/services.. Then you've got to set up xinetd to call Xvnc by adding a "vnc" file into the /etc/xinetd.d directory with content like:
/usr/bin/Xvnc
vnc 5950/tcp
in
service vnc
{
disable = no
socket_type = stream
protocol = tcp
wait = no
user = nobody
server =
server_args = localhost -inetd -once -broadcast -geometry 1024x768 -depth 16
log_on_succes += USERID
log_on_failure += USERID
}
I'm sure I've left something out (like some settings in X) but hopefully this will get you aimed in the right direction.
Depending on what sort of system you are using and your financial situation you could have your 'remote computer' mirror itself to a different 'remote computer' on a daily/hourly basis. You could have them both located at your place of residence and then have a cable modem for one pc and dsl for the second. They could then be mirroring each other over your LAN.
:) pfft.
If you need an entire 'image' of the remote pc the enterprise version of Norton Ghost and probably even Microsoft SMS have the ability to make an image of a pc and then throw the same image on a different pc. Both of those are rather expensive programs so if your a coder, you might be able to find/use an open-source solution. I know rsync will do directory mirroring but I don't know much more about it.
As far as email goes you could use a service that automatically forwards all email received to a different address and keeps a copy of it. This way if your email server goes down in the middle of the night you can still check any email received before that from your alternate server.
There are also companies that provide backup MX servers so if you receive email on a domain you 'control' you can have the backup MX take over in the event of the primary servers failure.
Anyways that was rather long winded and requires quite a bit of work/money so your better off just using Windows XP remote desktop
I used to work at Sun, and that's precisely the approach they use for the corporate WAN. It's partly about being able to access your data from anywhere, but it's mainly about the difficult of backing up data that isn't on servers. (Though that always struck me as kind of strange, since Sun sells backup applications that catch workstation data.) Such a setup has obvious advantages, but there were glitches:
XFree86 runs under Cygwin. It's quite nice. You can find their website here.
--Be human.
Not to be annoying, but if you read the rsync docs (which I just happened to do today) it explains how to do a bi-directional sync. It's pretty trivial, no need for another tool.
First lets talk physical removal from any machine. Even if you can't carry it around with you, you need not have it hard wired to the box. These boxes from are nice additions to keep you away from things like fan noise. And/Or you might opt for an older, all in one machine, that has an OS and can access the application server(s), like this one that you can find at.
There are a ton of web based email servers that host their own web client. Post.Office by is the best of breed, with other playing in the field for less money. If your local "viewer" is a windows hosted boxen, you can use Exceed from and you will find you can run x11 apps like they lived on your box.
You can find information about mirroring at, and more about load balancing at
You can employee all of these to secure your "server" machine, and sleep shoundly that if you have a hardware failure, you can still be running on your way. However I must inform you that the absolute best way to remove problems from your machine is deinstall windows of any kind.
Before I lead to confusion: This product is "not there yet" but it is part of the final plan.
The AmigaDE is a "virtual computer" and thus AmigaDE applications run anywhere. They are binary compatible to all devices the DE engine runs on. Some say: "This is like Java." But it is not. Java is a runtime-environment (in this case) but
the AmigaDE is a fully virtual computer, coming with its own CPU.
What does this mean, especially in referral to your question ?
It means, that all your beloved applications run everywhere. This way you need to carry a disk only, on which you have installed your favourite applications, databases etc. and as soon you find yourself using other hardware the DE runs on, you just slide in your disk and the "virtual computer" deflates. You use the same machine as the one at home, the DE does scale down and adapts to the hardware it is running on, be it a desktop, a PDA, a notebook or a special terminal at the airport (well, I said its not there yet ;-)).
While this does not mean that you access a central server remotely over a network (your question), this way you take your "central" machine away with you on a ZIP/JAZ disk (or so).
This is all very interesting and exciting stuff.
However, Amiga Inc. have not yet shown, who and what they are, and this makes me raise an eyebrow and concerned if we will see the DE ever going so far, to utilize its full potential.
This is such (theoretical at least) a revolution, that it will need time to absorb and get accustomed to. And the market plays an important role as well, sigh.
At the moment the AmigaDE is nothing more than a system running on (I am naming the most important platfomrs only) Windows, WindowsCE.NET, Linux (RedHat offer(ed?)s the SDK on their web-page (once?)) and others, mainly to play games on PDAs.
See here or here (list of mirrors) for a video [mpeg, 85MB] (or DivX v5, 13MB) where it gets demonstrated.
Hello?? Fred?! Is this you?
Yes, yes, it rides on top of Terminal Services or Windows 2000. But before you go off on a rant, it supports everything as a client from Dos to windows, to Unix, to OS2/warp, to Irix. It has Java clients, Web clients that imbed into a browser(netscape or IE), and did I mention anything that will run JAVA?
NFuse rocks, and guess what they don't just do this kind of thing for windows shells and *nix clients. They have pure java platforms running on linux and solaris. Citrix is way way way out on the power curve when it comes to this stuff. Coming from and admin that supports a multi-national 400+ Citrix node it central administration and control are just wonderful. Anyway I am not hear to get you to use Citrix because it will not be cost effective for most here and I will get bashed for the dreaded Microsoft, but anyone that says that Citrix sucks either never spent enough time working with it, or does not have a clue.
Give it a look.
With SpeedScreen2 the refresh rate is great, I have 40 people per dual proc machine surfing, mailing, and using the office suite. Hell you can even install a rouge copy of citrix and never register it but it will only work for one user tho it will last forever. This is very nice to set up on the box at home for remote access when your out on the road.
Enjoy
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead