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?"

Comments

These people are

[Rupert]

http://www.uk.research.att.com/spirit/

Sun Ray

[GeorgieBoy]

One of the niftier solutions I saw in use at Sun were Sun "Ray" stations, which were little boxes that had video/input/audio/etc. on them, no fan, and they were basically dumb terminals. You would insert your ID card and your desktop would come up immediately. It "just worked". Unfortunately it requires Sun hardware, but is quite interesting nonetheless. Citrix is the other environment that comes to mind. If you want free you'd need VNC though.

Re:X-Server

[tb3]

'Cos with VNC I can remote access my Dad's Win98 box from my OS X iBook, and fix LookOut Express for him. Can't do that with X-Server or Terminal Services.

Seperation of code and data

[Steffen]

I think that given current network technology, your goal is not really practical at present. The best you can do is have data stored in one central location, and then have a number of clients, each of which has software to interpret the data...

Basically, IMAP, LDAP etc. would be a good bet, with other higher level solutions presenting a different set of problems (think passport)

Re:Not so fast

[brer_rabbit]

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.

That isn't painful with unison. I use this to sync my laptop and desktop. Unlike rsync, unison can propogate changes in *both* directions. This allows me to keep my home directory consistent. And for the paranoid, it can even be used over ssh.

Re:It's called X (or X Windows if you prefer)

[electroniceric]

I'm trying to restrain a rant, but this kind of pooh-pooh-ing is exactly why Linux continues to look like everyone's kid brother.

I am a student, with the opportunity of working at home. At school - fairly good T1. At home 256K DSL. Which means as connectivity goes, I'm actually quite well off. I run Mandrake and Windows on both ends. In this setup (note again that it is an above-average one), I can tell you that using X (over SSH with compression enabled), Matlab (java app) runs juuuuust barely fast enough to be usable. Any KDE/GNOME apps - forgetaboutit. I used VNC for about 20 minutes before getting tired of waiting for the pointer to catch up to my mouse. My then-roommate, who works for Microsoft, could easily use PPTP to connect to his TermServ machine over the same connection. Not at all sluggish. In fact, he could even do it over dialup (then it was sluggish).

X windows does what it was designed to do - let you redirect displays over the local network, but it's not a long-distance remote access answer.

If we Linuxites want remote connectivity for desktop apps, we'll need to figure out how to make higher-level RPC calls. Being a KDE user, I'd love to see this built into QT or KDE.

That's the desktop part. Now the data storage part:
In our glorious remote computing future, your data is stored in the "network cloud". Microsoft will implement this by selling Cloud Server 1.0, which only works if you have Microsoft Synchronization Server running on Whistlerhorn XPDQ.

But rather than trying to do things exactly the MS does, we can do them the Linux way: make a "cloud" that you can tweak to your little heart's delight. Example: My cloud = my home box via DSL, an extra backup box at home, a work computer and a PDA. Mandrake could hypothetically build a nice installer that sets up a generic configuration for add storage to my cloud, and some preconfigurated synchronization settings. It won't snap into a network quite as smoothly as MS Cloud Server, but if I want to change the kernel latency for the cloud-synching process, I can just go ahead and do that. All on my own machines...

You send your PC away for repairs?

[crimoid]

when my main machine had to be sent away for repairs for a week

I'm trolling, but come on.... You send your PC away for repairs? What kind of geek are you!@?

ugh...

[percey]

I've recently had to install a remote access situation at work for a bunch of consultants working on a project. We have non-public IPs for our inhouse machines and a couple of webservers with public IP's and then I discovered the magic of SSH port forwarding. We were able to forward PCAnywhere as well as several other TCP ports (the one drawback of SSH is that you can't forward UDP ports) that allowed them to use client programs across the internet without compromising security. In fact its worked too well and almost everyone in the department has asked me to set up their system for PCAnywhere over SSH. Its a poor-man's VPN (which you would use to do it right). But with SSH you can forward VNC and X-Windows, and of course you have your SSH for your unix systems. Does it work well? Well that depends on your bandwidth. Lots of bandwidth makes everything more palatable.