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A Network Attached Windows Box?
Richard Weidmann asks: "Can a Windows box be attached to a local network as freely available resource? I use Mac OS X and Linux but sometimes it is simply convenient to have a Windows computer to do some specific task or run some specific program. I would like to run my Windows computer headless in the network in such a fashion that I can access it easily from the other computers such that: VLC is started, so I see the Windows desktop; the home directory of my current machine is mounted on the Windows box; and my local optical drive can be read from the Windows machine. Has anybody seen such a setup or project?"
VLC is a Video Lan Client
while
VNC is Virtual Network Computing
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
I believe this is what Terminal Services is designed for. If you are fortunate enough to have a terminal Serivices Server around you could also configure your home directory and things like that. For an El Cheapo version of this Find a Windows XP machine and turn desktop sharing on.
The only downside to using the XP machine instead of the TS Server is that it seems to limit you to one connection at a time.
Go Gusties
VNC and Samba should do the trick. Robin
Windows XP and higher support Remote Drive Sharing and Remote Sound over a regular Remote Desktop connection. Windows 2000 and below support Remote Desktop (well, the same protocol, but it's Terminal Services), but don't support the drive sharing or sound forwarding.
NO CARRIER
I think what you need is Citrix. It lets you access your drives as local drive, among other things.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
You have a Macintosh. Get Virtual PC, foo'. That's all there is to it. It works.
...
Plenty of people do this over Local and Wide area networks. A webserver.
...Just make sure that your windows box is either disconnected from the 'net or disallowed to access the 'net, elsewise you'll have people from Khazakstan executing those apps instead of you.
Install a piece of windows compatible webserver software (IIS - Recommended, Apache, or whatever else floats your boat). Create a page or two of ASP/PHP scripts which are designed to run the applications. Whenever you need to execute the apps, point a web browser over the network to the pages.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Why face the security holes of Windows when you can run Windows Apps in Linux! These two apps neeed more publicty then they have! Wine - Lets you run Windows applications on Linux Run Windows on Linux in a sandbox!. Be a good slashdotter, don't let Windows on the network, use the Penguin!
I have a fetish for traffic cones
Summary: I have a question. I want to have a headless Windows box on a network with access to my files and want to have remote control over the box. This can be done with VNC and NFS/other network file system. Are there any projects to do this?
Not to flame, but why don't you just *do* what you just suggested?
If I want to delete a file called "foo", I don't submit a story to Slashdot saying "I want to delete a file called 'foo' on my computer. I know that I can do by by running the command rm foo. Has anyone done the same thing before?" I just run the command.
May we never see th
i wouldn't do that.
We use VNC to manage our NT4 servers, and its not near as nice as the build in stuff through XP (which is licensed from Citrix I think?) Over a network connetion, its like sitting in front of the machine (very eery looking at an XP desktop on my powerbook when you run the RDP client at full screen.)
P
-- My dog can beat up your dog.
I ran a headless Windoze box for specific tasks first using VNC then Terminal Services. It works rather well and it's nice to have Winduhs in proper chains.
I've got a headless Win2K box sitting under the desk at the office and use MS's Remote Desktop Client to connect to it from my Mac. It'll let you share you Mac's disk drives and printers with the remote machine although for security's sake you may want to use Samba instead.
From Linux I use rdesktop. There is a nice Gnome GUI available for it if that's your bag. rdesktop has proven to be very stable and usable. You can get rdesktop for the Mac via the Fink project if you want to avoid the MS client on Mac.
I've found both work well, even over dial-up connections.
This has been done before. Try:
Wine if you just want a few Windows apps on your PC.
Win4Lin if you really want Windows on your PC.
VMWare if you want XP on your PC.
TightVNC if you want to access a Windows box from another box.
Samba if you want to share your drives back to your Windows box.
If you really want the windows box be on a separate computer I would use VNC but I run windows through vmware when I need to.
Then both OS's are run at the same time on the same computer, Windows runs like every other app on Linux
http://vmware.com
Is there anything that lets you export MSWindows windows rootless to a different machine like Remote X?
In case anyone's interested, the number one reason is DC++ P2P App, for which there is not a suitable replacement in *nux, for both usability and political reasons.
Try Tarantella, made by the folks who USED to be called SCO (the ones who sold the name to Caldera).
This product is much like Citrix, but _much_ easier to administer and requires zero software be loaded on the machines the display is coming from or the ones the display is being forwarded to.
Oh, and it runs on Solaris or Linux!
The client uses any Java capable web-browser... can't get any simpler than that.
You will still need the MS-Windows box to actually run the apps on and provide the display, etc.
Tarantella will not only provide access to your local drives, but also your printers (configurable for security).
The data is also encrypted, so it's safe to use this as a remote-access method via the internet.
http://www.tarantella.com/
As a disclaimer, I should mention that I not only use this at work for remote access, but I work for a Tarantella reseller.
With this in mind, note that I'm pointing you to Tarantella's site, not the company I work for (we won't see any profit if you get it from someone else).
I just happen to like the product better than its alternatives.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
WinXP Pro has "Remote Desktop Sharing", so enable that and simply use rdesktop from your *nix box. It's that easy. If you want your home directory mounted on your Windoze box, then use SAMBA on your *nix box as a PDC (Primary Domain Controller) and have your Windoze box log in to this domain (You can then setup SAMBA to automatically mount the home directory on the Windoze box as Z: or whatever). That should do it.
It's laggy and generally a bad joke compared to a $200 PC.
I'm planning on buying a reasonably slim single board computer with a P3 mobile on it, and putting it into a very thin metal enclosure with an external power supply hookup. The biggest problem is reliable video from it - XP costs money and has horrible registration crap I am avoiding, Win2k which I have a liscence for needs terminal server, and even then I think it won't run on the workstation edition.
VNC is buggy. It's fine for a terminal, but often fonts get munged and graphical artifacts get left all over the place.
I'll probably break down and get XP - that plus a thin single board computer solves all your problems if you have a powerbook, as it has a terminal client from microsoft available.
..don't panic
Yes sir. It is called Terminal Services (read: Citrix) and thats how half of our company functions. We even have an awesome 3.2GHz Xeon dual-cpu hyperthreaded xSeries 235 with 6 RAIDED disks, serving many applications to many users as a test server. Looks like we can linearly scale the server's power with the number of users, until the requirements give in and we switch to Sun.
Terminal Services come with Windows 2000 Server, but I believe can be seperately installed with Windows2000 pro.
Note also many hosting providers are offering dedicated servers accessible by PC Anywhere.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I have two machines on my work desktop: P4 2.6, SuSE 9, 3 video cards, 3 x 17" monitor, many virtual desktops on each. P4 2.6, Win2k Server, Headless. Through the magic of RDesktop, I access the Win2k server for Outlook, and Visio. Aside from that it is used as file storage and IIS testbed.
.Net server, its support for RDP 5.1 allows this.
RDesktop works as well as or better than the Windows or Mac term-serv clients. However, if you want full color (>256) and full sound support, you'll need WinXP or
I very very rarely have to attach a monitor to the Windows server, I often have multiple RDP sessions running, say on my laptop and on my desktop. You can configure X hotkeys to remain in effect within the RDP session, allowing you to run the remote desktop fullscreen with no borders, and still use hotkeys to switch virtual desktops (shift+left/right arrow for example).
Windows multi-head support is miles behind X, IMHO, and the 3 head setup is a huge productivity gain. If my lame desktop machine had any more slots, I'd totally slam more video cards in it.
We also use Term Services and RAdmin (www.famatech.com) to administer our production server farm, very convenient.
I like music
Of course, VNC is encrypted, it just isn't built into all VNC clients/servers. Usually, people run it over ssh, which has the added advatage over Remote Desktop that you don't need any new firewall rules (since ssh usually is already there) and that you don't have to figure out a new key management system.
If you like, of course, you can also run VNC over stunnel or IPsec.
When it is useful, some VNC clients/servers (e.g. clients running as Java applets) have the encryption built in.
As usual, the UNIX solution is simpler, more elegant, more flexible, and more functional than the Windows solution. And, as usual, Windows users like yourself just don't get it.
Being a Windows admin, sometimes I wonder about the Windows knowledge of the average /.'er. Being a relatively newbie to Linux, this then makes me wonder about the Linux knowledge of the average /.'er. (Note that this isn't directed at you, but rather at the general discussion.)
Being a windows admin myself, among other things, I have noticed that the average slashdot poster fears Windows like the plague. It's amazing how much people here judge everything made by microsoft without even bothering to check if their assumptions are correct. I do not like MS either, but at least I try to keep an open mind and not automatically label MS products as shit just because they're made by an evil company.
The secret to a successful
VNC will allow you to access your windows desktop from any routable computer that runs a VNC client. VNC runs on almost every OS, including Palm, I think.
You won't be able to see remote filesystems unless you can mount them on the windows machine -- for UNIX, you could use Samba... for other OS's, well, I don't know.
I actually do the opposite from what you want to do -- I run a headless FreeBSD box and then view the VNC (X) desktop remotely on a Windows machine (full-screen, no less). Performance is about the same as running locally and I can still use all my Office products (necessary for my job, sadly).
Best of all, VNC is free and open-source (does that make us for me using Windows?) >:-)
I don't even think IPSec allows for you to communicate with machines on the same LAN on the same Subnet.
d d 0.0.0.0/0 192.168.0.2 any -P in ipsec esp/tunnel/192.168.0.1-192.168.0.2/require;
I don't know about the Windows implementation, but KAME (the *BSD IPSec stack, also used in Mac OS X, Linux 2.6 and Debian's patched Linux 2.4) looks as though it will do that fine.
Set up a policy for all traffic from anywhere to your Windows box, and vice versa, to have mandatory encryption in tunnel mode.
You will then need to to set up more specific policies for UDP port 500 (isakmp), and for protocols 50 (esp) and 51 (ah), to avoid trying to apply IPSec to them, since they're what IPSec itself uses (if you don't de-restrict these, you have a chicken and egg problem). You may also want to allow non-IPSec'ed DNS, or ssh, or whatever
Totally untested configuration (you may need to reverse the order of the lines):
#!/usr/bin/setkey -f
# This config is for the restricted box
# On the gateway, exchange the "in" and "out" keywords
flush;
spdflush;
# IPSec gateway is 192.168.0.1
# Restricted box is 192.168.0.2
# ISAKMP over UDP
spdadd 192.168.0.1[500] 192.168.0.2[500] udp -P in none;
spdadd 192.168.0.2[500] 192.168.0.1[500] udp -P out none;
# Encrypted IPSec data
spdadd 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.2 esp -P in none;
spdadd 192.168.0.2 192.168.0.1 esp -P out none;
# "Signed" IPSec data
spdadd 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.2 ah -P in none;
spdadd 192.168.0.2 192.168.0.1 ah -P out none;
# Everything else
spdadd 192.168.0.2 0.0.0.0/0 any -P out ipsec esp/tunnel/192.168.0.2-192.168.0.1/require;
spda
Saturday 27 March 2004 I created such a setup for my father. Most of the things that he wants to do know, he can do on Linux (I use Libranet + Debian updates), but he has a scanner which is not supported under Linux, a simple organizer which must exchange data through a Windows program, and a slide scanner, which uses an old Adaptec SCSI card in an ISA slot.
I set up his Windows computer headless, Win98, and you must use TweakUI for the system to automatically logon on the network. You must also disable the Stop on No Keyboard in the BIOS.
I installed tightVNC, which automatically starts up as a service. I also setup Samba to export the home directory, so that everything that is being saved on the Windows computer, must always be done on the mapped drive.
Jurgen
MacOS X already comes with a very nice windows system. Also, have you tried using XWindows on GNU/Linux?
I've got mod points and I would mod this story -1 troll if I could.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Serious question here: What is the purpose of Citrix, Tarantella, pcAnywhere, and the like?
In the way olden days, I heard that a legitimate use of Citrix was to get Windows-ish performance out of x286 hardware. For example, if you had 1,000 users on x286 machines, and brand spanking new x486/Pentium boxes cost $2000 each, then for an upgrade to something capable of running Windows 3.1x or Windows 95, your hardware costs alone would be $2,000,000. Fine. Say five massive Citrix servers, at $100,000 per, servicing two hundred x286 clients each, would run you $500,000, and you'd save $1,500,000 in upgrade costs.
But the scenario I've outlined would have been valid circa 1996. In 2004, we're at the point where hardware is very nearly worthless: You can get a monstrous hardware client for $500, and 1000 X $500 = the $500,000 you'd spend on Citrix. In today's business climate, it's hard to imagine a scenario in which hardware costs are not DWARFED by software & service costs for enterprise systems. I can't think of a modern use for Citrix, Tarantella, or pcAnywhere, unless either
As an example of 1), you might have some single user application that lives solely on a salesman's desktop computer, and when he's on the road, he uses pcAnywhere on his laptop to login remotely to his desktop and fiddle with that piece of single-user software on his desktop that was never designed to support multi-user access in the first place. Yeah, I'll agree that pcAnywhere provides a quick and dirty hack that gets the job done, but good grief: If you start mandating support for these hacks as applied to a broad spectrum of users, it seems to me that the support team is gonna go absolutely insane from the complexity of the thing [not to mention the insecurity of having myriad laptops lying around in airport lounges and hotel bars, each with access to the very heart of your network...].But what in the world is the purpose of Citrix in this day and age? To host a single copy of WordPerfect or Attachmate at a central location and allow hundreds of users to cheat on client licenses? Or are you using Citrix to cheat Microsoft out of Windows or MSOffice licenses on each of your client workstations? It's just real hard for me to imagine a scenario where you would want to centralize around a solution like that.
Please enlighten me.
PS: Have any of you Citrix guys heard of this thing called Portal Services? Or is the answer: Yeah, we've heard of Portal Services, but the short-term cost of porting [no pun intended] our systems to Portal Services is much less than the short-term cost of a quick and dirty pcAnywhere/Citrix hack, so we're sticking with the quick and dirty hack, plus, because the hack is so insanely complicated, it gives us job security into the foreseeable future...
from the description, you're talking a doze box to be accessed by osx and nix boxen on your lan, but one 'user' behind it all, you. for a time, I had a doze box headless (due to shortage of monitors). used realVNC. the box was a PII 350/384MB running win2kpro. it never went past 16bit @ 800x600 for performance reasons, but it worked. the clients were mostly doze (game box client, the doze box in question was "the dump" a sandbox to use P2P filesharing with). I got a linux client working just fine. Anything mounted on the headless machine SHOULD be on a samba share under linux (CD iso mounting, cd drive, netshares, etc), just use tweakui to move DESKTOP and Mydocs folders to the mapped share (use your linux homedir, doze will see it as N:\desktop and N:\mydocs and your nix box as /home/usernamehere/windows/desktop and ../mydocs respectivly (it's all in smb.conf, default shares the users linux homedir to each user.
The trouble is, windows was NEVER designed to be operated remotely, no matter how much you trick it (VNC, RDP, etc) it still assumes a user is at the console, or WILL be if anything bad happens. linux has no qualms running X headless (no local output), while doze will waste pci bandwidth running a ui you don't use.
honestly, if you have windows only apps (what are they) that you can run headless (that kills games and leaves accounting/office/networking ops), try wineX, win4lin or crossover office. I can think of few things windows is good for besides: gaming, running doze only HW (some tv tuners and such) and a few apps that don't run under linux that don't have a linux equivolent 9quicken/quickbooks comes to mind but crossover office can run both with a little help.
I run three desktop boxes and three headless boxes:
Windows game box (primary client)
Linux desktop work box (gentoo/KDE)
Windows mediabox (ATI AIW Tuner, winamp video)
Linux router/web server
Linux file server (Raid 5)
Linux print server (an aging P-133/16MB that actually runs gentoo :p)
all nix boxes are accessed by SSH or local console, there are two other remote doze boxen that i VNC to (unless they're having printer trouble), but they have local heads.
remember, doze does not to headless well, was never built for it to begin with.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
While this was something of a answered-your-own-question question, I'm glad it was posted because it knocked me out of the box my mind was in, trying to figure out a good solution to my own situation. My last for-legacy-apps Windows machine at home is a laptop with a busted LCD, and I've been fighting with its VGA-out port (which is overly fond of acting as a second display instead of mirroring) and a video switch connected to my server's cheapo monitor to keep using it. It was already accessing shared directories via Samba, and now that I've got VNC going, I can use the nice keyboard and display on my Linux box or Mac to access it, and lean the laptop out of the way against the wall.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Since you don't have any more free slots, why not set up an older machine with a NIC and a few matrox graphics cards (I bet you could fit a GigE card and five triple-head parhelia cards in there.... just need to win the irish lottery now, eh?) and use DMX to distribute your display over 18 (that's your 3 + 15) screens? It'd be a pain scrolling slashdot though ;)
So, here's that url...
http://dmx.sourceforge.net/
Dynamic MAXSCREENS
Regards,
TheScienceKid
A few pop to mind.
1.
You have an app that requires a serious amount of computing power, and a bunch of people who use it.... you don't want to buy each one a $40k monster, so you just by one.
2.
Ease of administration... you only have to install/tweak/fight-with/de-virus/etc. one box.
3.
Remote access... this is the biggie. At my company, many people need to access internal applications (that involve databases, etc.) remotely, this allows them to work from home, customer sites, etc.
With Tarantella, you don't just get a remote desktop like you do with Citrix... you get a totally configurable "webtop" that I couldn't possibly describe the capabilities of here.
Suffice it to say that when I log into Tarantella, I can launch a whole mess of different applications by themselves (without a remote desktop), or a full remote desktop to an array of different systems (running everything from MS-Windows to Solaris to Linux)... all from any system that has a Java capable web-browser.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
I use RealVNC and find it works great for me as a system administrator. I don't have any headless clients, but it has other uses..
My primary domain server lost the keyboard port a while back, but I was able to get it working again via the mouse port, obviously losing the mouse. So instead, I use RealVNC to work on this server..
Also somewhat unrelated, one of my other domain servers is located about an hour's drive away at another site, and I have found it extremely useful to be able to login remotely to add users, check the DHCP leases, etc.., without having to drive all of the way down there to do a 5 minute task.
RealVNC has some minor glitches you have to work through/figure out, but overall it's extremely easy to set up and use, and is one of the handiest utilities I've found in a while. I believe it works for UNIX too (which could have some great uses as well), but I am just using it for Win now..
Depending on what version of windows you have:
XP - has native terminal services for a SINGLE user console access
2000 Pro, NT, 9x - you can use VNC for SINGLE user console access
2000 or 2003 server - has native terminal services for MULTI user..
NT - Get the Terminal server edition ( though you cant buy that now from Microsoft.. )
Can add Citrix on top any of the server editions and run ICA client....
Note this does NOT take into account any of the licensing issues with any of those choices....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Apples and oranges. PcAnywhere is vastly different from Citrix. Citrix can make things appear as if they are on your desktop, not in a remote window. The major advantage is centralised administration. All the user needs on their machine is the client, which they can get from the internal webpage for logging in to Citrix. Anyone on the road can also log in and get their desktop anywhere in the world they can get on the internet. Your support costs go way, way down using this method. If someone 6,000 miles away can't get their e-mail, all you have to do is walk a few feet to the server room and see what the issue is. If they can get to the web, they can get to their application. You can have more people working from home, on the road, etc. The main purpose of Citrix is not to cheat on licenses, but to centralise and simplify administration. Want to deploy that latest update? A few clicks and it is done. Instead of spending an entire day running around to various client machines. MS still gets their licensing fees.
I hate sigs.
You have an app that requires a serious amount of computing power, and a bunch of people who use it.... you don't want to buy each one a $40k monster, so you just by one.
Fine, but it sounds like you've taken an App that was designed for single-users, placed it on a Citrix [or Tarantella] box, and tried to force the App [against its nature] to become a multi-user App.
Why not purchase an App that was designed to run on a server in multi-user mode, and run it from the server to begin with? The only reasons I can see to avoid doing that are either
As for the rest of your post about Tarantella, it sounds like you're using Tarantella as a Portal, which is a perfectly valid approach to network design. If indeed Tarantella has morphed into a Portal Services provider, then I've got no problem with that.By and large, it sounds like you're using Citrix as a Portal, which is a perfectly valid approach to network design.
However, you added the following:
Am I to conclude that you're using drive-less [disk-less] client workstations, and the clients are booting their operating systems off the network from a Citrix box?Or do your client workstations still have their own hard-drives and their own copies of the operating system?
Not diskless clients, thin clients. So, they have their own HDDs, but access most applications through the portal. I do not have this deployed, it is just in testing.
I hate sigs.
Not diskless clients, thin clients. So, they have their own HDDs, but access most applications through the portal. I do not have this deployed, it is just in testing.
Are you gonna try this over 100mbps ethernet, or do you have Gigabit switches? It's certainly an intriguing idea over gigabit [if you've got really good switches with boatloads of RAM], but I'm dubious as to whether these massive modern operating systems and modern applications can be loaded efficiently over 100mbps pipes.
PS: Are your pagefiles [pagefile.sys] gonna be local or on the Citrix server? Similar questions would apply to your profiles [roaming versus local] and your Outlook/Exchange data. These things can be really massive [gigabytes each].
Over 100mbps. It really is not that much data being passed back and forth, just refreshing the video information. The applications live on the server. Profiles don't much matter if everything is on the server. All the Exchange data would reside on the server farm as well. We would like for nothing to be stored on the client's machine, for backup and data integrity purposes.
Wow. Sounds like a helluvan ambitious project.
Only two other thoughts I'd have would be:
Is this story a troll?