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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?"
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.
For one system?!!?! I certainly hope you're joking! I've setup Citrix systems for hundreds of users, and it's no walk in the park if you want the system accessible as well as secure. For those of you who do use Citrix with Microsoft Office products, investigate AppSense for keeping things locked down. VNC with properly configured IP filtering and/or a firewall would be better here.
Or you can get a Windows XP machine, and buy WinConnect Server XP. It allows you to have up to 21 Terminal Server connections on Windows XP.
It works really well. I'd also suggest using rdesktop on Linux and the Windows Remote Desktop Client on the Mac.
Remote Desktop is much better than VNC, especially when used over the internet because VNC is not encrypted at all. Remote Desktop includes built in 128 bit encryption.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Really, that's not true at all. Samba not only supports everything ona a share that Windows does, but according to some tests it is significantly faster than Windows.
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.
I use Ultr@VNC from here. It works better the Real, and tight in my experience. If I recall correctly it incorporates all the features of the other VNC's and adds a few new ones, like file transfer, chat, etc.
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...
So, I guess the question is, what kinda bandwidth does RDP take? And is there a remote desktop server for 2k pro? I use vnc + ssh(vnc in an ssh tunnel) to access my home computer via the internet, and it's usable but laggy.
:(
I personally hate xp's reomte desktop, since my laptop's screen res is about 500 pixels wider, and 80 taller than my desktops, so when I remote desktop to my laptop, my icon placement gets re-adjusted for the screen space, and it remembers the changes when I log off remote desktop, and log back in locally.
And to top it off, even over 100Mbit lines, remote desktop can't handle full-motion video. RealVNC doesn't even try, overlay isn't forwarded, and I don't know any windows video players that don't use the overlay for the video.. (And I'm too lazy to boot my laptop just to see if I can run a video from a linux vnc server.)