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Abcdesktop – a cloud native desktopless system

abcdesktop.io

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Re: Abcdesktop – a cloud native desktopless system

#21

Post by TuringTest »

Why do I keep getting this distinct impression that people use containers to keep reinventing OS processes, but "in the cloud!"?

Next thing, you'll see announced a platform for reusable container services that can be dynamically linked from other containers - to avoid including them multiple times in your application containers that share the same version, and we'll have come full circle.

Is there a subtle detail about packaging software for distribution as isolated executables that I'm missing?

Re: Abcdesktop – a cloud native desktopless system

#22

Post by digitallyfree »

derekzhouzhen wrote: post #6
legalcorrection wrote: post #5

What is the performance like? I’ve found that VNC is garbage even in on a fast local network, let alone over the internet. I’ve yet to find something that works anywhere close to as well as Microsoft RDP, which feels like sitting in front of a local machine as long as you don’t try watching HD video or something.

A good VNC client should give you responsiveness on par of RDP. VNC tunnel through web socket to a client running in a browser window may push it to the annoying zone though.

VNC can have good performance over gig LAN using raw encoding. The issues occur when you add compression (hextile, tight, etc.) which does a good job cutting bandwidth but adds a ton of latency, which is the main reason your sessions feels slow. RDP does a great job of keeping the latency down.

Note that I have never had a good experience using noVNC (the web-based solution used by this service) even over fast LAN - I think it's because of the additional overhead of the web browser.

I personally use SPICE for VDI which performs decently over LAN, but is not as good as RDP over WAN with constrained bandwidth.

Re: Abcdesktop – a cloud native desktopless system

#26

Post by antx »

syncbehind wrote: post #24
antx wrote: post #23

stop encouraging users to pipe curl to the shell, darn it.

Is that bad?

The most probable issue related to this kind of behaviour is pastejacking.

It's possible for the server to detect that you're actually using curl (with the help of the user agent of other methods) and also that you're piping it to an interpreter.

Knowing that, the server could send you a malicious payload, that wouldn't be apparent when only downloading the file otherwise.

Some people think this isn't the real issue, that (the lack of) code signing is the real problem. I don't disagree with that, but really, people should look at the code they're going to execute, whenever possible.

And when I say "whenever possible", I sure believe a few lines of shell script deserves to be inspected. Even if you lose the 0.5 seconds of automation the pipe provided. I mean, we're not talking about millions of lines of kernel code, here.

Re: Abcdesktop – a cloud native desktopless system

#27

Post by rkeene2 »

TuringTest wrote: post #21

Why do I keep getting this distinct impression that people use containers to keep reinventing OS processes, but "in the cloud!"? Next thing, you'll see announced a platform for reusable container services that can be dynamically linked from other containers - to avoid including them multiple times in your application containers that share the same version, and we'll have come full circle. Is there a subtle detail abo…

It's the same reason people keep inventing VMs. Every process is also a VM (and can only do what the hypervisor... kernel... allows), but it's a more convenient abstraction to run a new kernel and its processes in a hardware emulating VM within that VM for many kinds of workloads, despite the overhead of emulating hardware.

Containers are a middle-ground, and a useful abstraction -- where you can have a group of processes that can share some resources and be accounted for together, but without the need to emulate hardware or a second hypervisor (kernel).

For lots of workloads, though, processes would be enough. Some more could be done with additional work to kernels to help group processes together (Linux cgroups, Solaris contracts and zone facilities) and more container-aware schedulers (Not sure what Linux has, Solaris has a 2-layer scheduler for its containers).

I was heavily into containers in the 90s and 2000s, and then VMs when they became more viable with Xen 2, but I've been moving things back to just processes.

Re: Abcdesktop – a cloud native desktopless system

#28

Post by FpUser »

legalcorrection wrote: post #5

What is the performance like? I’ve found that VNC is garbage even in on a fast local network, let alone over the internet. I’ve yet to find something that works anywhere close to as well as Microsoft RDP, which feels like sitting in front of a local machine as long as you don’t try watching HD video or something.

Nomachine works fine for me even on relatively crappy connection.

Re: Abcdesktop – a cloud native desktopless system

#30

Post by chunk_waffle »

10000truths wrote: post #25
syncbehind wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that bad?

No worse than downloading a pre-built binary off the internet and running it.

If you follow that to it's logical conclusion then "everything is terrible and nothing is secure" (which is probably the reality)

My personal gripe with piping curl output to sh is about expectations. If I have some binary I'm running, I have _some_ expectations about what it will do, same for a Makefile, and RPM, etc. None of those things are guaranteed to do what they're supposed to but I have some idea what _should_ happen.

Unless I read through the script, I have less expectations about what the script is going to do. It says it will install my program but is it going to pull in dependencies from my package manager? Download and compile something, shove binaries in my $PATH, edit dot files in $HOME?

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