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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?"
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.
:)
The problem is, even if you're doing everything remotely, you're pretty much stuck using one computer as a central repository for everything--programs and data. Unless you are planning on keeping sensitive data all over the place, it all has to physically reside somewhere.
And if you do replicate everything, what about keeping consistency?? This problem you have will always be around. Okay, so you use Hotmail as your email client so you can access it from everywhere...what about a Hotmail outage, or MS goes out of business?
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
If you want to be served graphics over a link, and want responsiveness and resolution, then you will require a high speed connection. Add to that the thought that if you plan to have a virtual desktop encompassing a large data store, you're talking about having this on-line somewhere and again you are talking about a good high speed connection. And of course, storage space.
For many of us , good high-speed connections are still the holy grail and things like VNC sort of work over the Internet, but if your server machine goes away, suddenly you don't have access to your data, etc. and over a slow link, VNC is kind of choppy.
As the ubiquity of high speed links grows, and the cost of on-line storage and access goes down, and as the feasibility of decent data-security goes up, this kind of idea should become more generally interesting. It isn't a bad idea now... it just isn't a terribly viable business for anyone to get into yet I don't expect.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
It didn't occur to you to get a spare machine, and invest in a CDRW drive or ethernet hub instead ?
You would still have to put your data and applications on a dedicated server? And if that server crash you'll still loose your access...
And what about software licence? can you put an application on a server and access it thru a remote desktop (Microsoft doesn't permit this I think)
Try it! Library of Babel
You need to start using X11. The Windows API - embodied in Win32 - simply has troubles if you "remote" it.
You need to start using a remotable ("network transparent") windowing system. All your apps will come with it. All of the modern windowing systems (X11 Be whatever Apple calls NeXTStep now) are network transparent. Use a modern OS and a modern windowing system will come along for the ride.
Oh wait - you want Word I mean "productivity apps" to come along? I think you're stuck with being tied to a particular computer. And the situation there will only get worse - DMCA and newer EULAs are going to make it harder and harder to do things like have a backup use a remote desktop etc etc.
Remote administration is not the same as a true virtual desktop. Try to imagine yourself in his situation before offering a solution - would you want to do all your work all the time over VNC? I wouldn't. I wouldn't mind it so much over TS or X.
Basically, any remote client other than what Microsoft provides with XP violates the EULA. That includes VNC, PCAnywhere, and I even think GoToMyPC is included in this!
Besides, VNC doesn't include encryption. You can tunnel it through a VPN or SSH or IPSEC etc, but that's it.
Don't get me wrong - I LOVE VNC - I use it at EVERY client site as a remote administration and troubleshooting tool on Windows. I've sat on the mailing list in the past. Quentin Stafford-Fraiser, Wez & co at AT&T labs and Cambridge U. do an OUTSTANDING job - but there are limitations (in MS Windows, mind you - not VNC) that make it not so great for Windows remote desktop applications. Built in encryption would be nice too.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
Web based anything blows! (Well now that I got that out of the way) The net, and even local networks I've found to be far more unreliable than a local machine. I think you'd find the downtime because of any number of network, server, internet or ISP failures to be far more problematic than a single machine failure.
Just have a plan for a fast recovery (I.e. actually BACKUP you data frequently) should there actually be a catestrophic failure of your local machine.
Getting to your mail or data is sort of nice as a secondary interface, but with all the security problems involved, and it's general flakiness/slowness all around in accessing your programs or data over even a LOCAL network, I've never understood the want.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
The Citrix Metaframe Java client has an applet mode so you can access an app or server from anywhere that has Netscape or IE browser.
s p
http://www.citrix.com/download/java-downloads.a
.NET is not just Web Services, Passport, or the CLR.
.NET is a marketing strategy and branding term to make a bunch of Microsoft stuff seem like a unified platform/new product line
.NET has the following parts:
Ok there are several ways of doing this on a windows network or even a non windows network. Samba or a NT server, it doesn't matter.
For the most basic way to get your profile across a network, just change your user account's profile to point to some network share. Now anytime you log in, your desktop, screen settings, ect will be accessable as long as your programs are installed on the network too.
Samba does sorta make this easier, with the whole $HOME directory analogy.
It's that easy, none of this VNC crap. If you wanted to switch enviroments from windows to *nix you could telnet into a *nix machine, you could use reflectionX to get a remote X display on your windows machine. Best yet you could use a *nix machine to connect to a *nix machine because that would be so l33t0 kR4d D00D.
It doesn't need to be overengineered, just go to your user manager and set the profile path.
What you have to watch out for is that some toolkits and applications written for X11 these days seem to come out of a Windows mentality and assume that they are running locally; Mozilla and Gnome are offenders in this regard (KDE may be as well). They mostly work remotely, but sometimes they make the wrong assumptions about how to communicate with other applications. For example, they may get their resources not out of the display's resource database but out of some local configuration files. Or they may pop up another window on the wrong display. Those things should be reported as bugs when they occur.
Systems like VNC are also great and much easier to set up. However, their big disadvantage is that they remote only a whole desktop; they don't try to integrate multiple applications running on multiple machines. VNC also seems to be more bandwidth intensive than normal X11 sessions, although VNC can be faster than X11 for image-heavy applications (including some "modern" X11 toolkits that ignore all the X11 drawing commands and just blit everything--yuck).
So, my recommendadtion is: use X11 for most remote access, but use VNC for cross-platform applications or if you want a persistent desktop.
I could imagine some new PC with maybe a BIOS problem, hard-drive failure, or any of the numerable M$-W problems that the "tech support" couldn't figure out and suggested that the only resolution was to just send it in ... especially if the user wasn't supplied the installation CD's like HP has been doing.
News For Geeks doesn't necessarily imply *nix-geek.
m.mmm..myyy
No matter how you do it - eventually, your data is on *a* machine. Eventually, it's residing somewhere - be it a single server or a couple rsync'd or otherwise servers.
...." yadda yadda yadda - I rsync my data to my home desktop each morning before going to work, I can optionally rsync from work before I leave (but I rarely do as rarely does anything change while at work, I can just ssh to my shell account where my email is coming in to check for any important mails)
My 'solution' - a laptop.
"But its expensive and if it breaks
That said - it's wonderful *always* having your data with you. Yeah I have a palm, but I don't send and recieve my emails with it - and it'd be ridiculous to try with the volume I (and probably most of us) get. The fact of the matter is - I have a hard time envisioning a scenario where I trust someone so much as to plop down on their windows machine with keyboard logger and punch in all my passwords, but I'm fine jacking my laptop into their network and tunneling all my communications to my hearts content.
It's nice to have access to stuff from everywhere - but don't do it at the cost of giving everyone else access.
Oh yeah - and wireless is fun, but tunnel *everything* or all this security advice is pretty much ridiculously useless.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.