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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Don't forget Win4Lin. It'll only run win9X, but it works well for me.
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.
I've been using VNC since it's inception and it works great for Unix to Unix with SSH doing the encryption. Here we are talkin Linux/Mac OS to Unix. Unless you buy some commercial SSH Server, or set up cygwin's ssh server on the Windows box then it's probably not going to be encrypted.
Most VNC's use encryption only for the password and use plaintext transfers for everything else. Not my ideal solution. Remote Desktop has encryption built into the protocol from the start.
If you like, of course, you can also run VNC over stunnel or IPsec.
I don't even think IPSec allows for you to communicate with machines on the same LAN on the same Subnet. Besides Remote Desktop has encryption covered already. We're talkin Linux/Mac to Windows communication. This is stupid any which way you cut it. Unix to Unix would use VNC over SSH. Who in their right mind would do something this stupid.
When it is useful, some VNC clients/servers (e.g. clients running as Java applets) have the encryption built in.
Name one that does encryption from beginning to end, not just the password. I would like to know if there are any myself.
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.
As usual trolls like yourself don't bother to read what the user is asking and bash anyone who doesn't tell them to switch to Unix. Your zealotry is only overshadowed by your stupidity.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
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
However, it doesn't sound like this is the case. It sounds like the asker will be using this system lightly to moderately, over a local network. Therefore, can you justify this:
WinConnect Server XP can be purchased for US $299.95 for a three user license.
Even if it's only $100 for one user, for the kind of use he implies, that money could be better spent. VNC (and ssh---yes, even through Cygwin---if necessary) sounds just right; RD would be overkill.
XP doesn't need WinConnect Server XP to do Remote Desktop. For a single user XP works fine with RD and since it will be headless it shouldn't be a problem whatsoever.
RD on a single user XP machine is probably the best solution.
I brought up WinConnect in reply to a user two parent posts up, who had said that if you wanted more than one user you have to get Win2k w/ a Terminal Services license. My point was, you don't.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
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
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...
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
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..