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Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

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Re: Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

#71

Post by drunkcatsdgaf »

gioele wrote: post #29
jitl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "clientless" as in you don't have to install any software on the machine you want to connect from. No need to fiddle with RDP software on your parent's computers, or worry about access control restrictions from a locked-down corporate network. As far as permissions go, if you can browse the internet on a computer, you can remote control your servers with Guacamole.

> It's "clientless" as in you don't have to install any software on the machine you want to connect from. Except a browser compatible with HTML5-august-2014-revision. Believe it or not, there are many places stuck in pre-HTML5 times (hotel computers, for example). If it could stream GIFs and accept clicks with server-side image maps, then it would be compatible with every desktop graphical browser in existence (Opera…

You could always install a older version, this has been around for roughly 2 years now.

Re: Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

#72

Post by yohanatan »

iandanforth wrote: post #55

I've found remote desktop setup immensely frustrating in the past. Every six months or so I'll think "Wouldn't it be cool if it I could have an Ubuntu AMI on EC2 I could boot and remote desktop into?" Then it's hours of googling and config settings editing. Hopefully someone will point me to the easy way I've been missing?

https://github.com/rogaha/docker-desktop

Re: Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

#73

Post by heywire »

cbhl wrote: post #67
blutoot wrote: post #63

I'm thinking of the implication of something awesome like this. Hopefully in the long-run it will boost the likes of light LTE-enabled Chromebooks, at least for tech professionals. That of course requires high-speed LTE infrastructure and ISP backbones.

Eh, Chrome Remote Desktop and Fusionlabs' Chrome RDP both already allow Chromebooks to be used for remote desktops (the latter speaking actual RDP), although both are closed-source.

I do something similar using Ericom AccessToGo (FREE) to RDP from my Samsung Chromebook (ARM) to various Windows boxes.

Re: Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

#74

Post by jitl »

drunkcatsdgaf wrote: post #70
jitl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately RDP server on Linux is a bit tricky to set up, and involved some amount of compiling for me. On the other hand, I think `x11vnc` is pretty easy to get started with. I followed this guide, and it worked for me no problem: http://askubuntu.com/questions/229989/how-to-setup-x11vnc-to... My guacamole server then connects to x11vnc so I still get RDP-like performance across the internet. Edit: you'll also wa…

Did you check out freerdp? I believe its in most package managers.

Freerdp's server component is pretty experimental and mostly undocumented. The freerdp package you're referring to is a RDP client, not a server. This was the best result I got for googling "freerdp server": http://askubuntu.com/questions/475776/can-freerdp-be-used-as...

Very much still a compile-it-yourself experience. When I was setting up my RDP server on my Mint media center, I went with xrdp + x11rdp setup detailed in some guides at ScaryGliders.net, although the same guy as released a bunch of scripts to do it for you, see https://github.com/scarygliders/X11RDP-o-Matic

I don't really want to deal with recompiling stuff and manual updates though, and expect others to feel the same, which is why I advocated x11vnc to the GP.

Re: Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

#75

Post by jitl »

ibisum wrote: post #69
jitl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a separate Guacamole application instance for each user or even each VNC/RDP host -- each user in your Guacamole config has its own connection settings and operates independently of other sessions.

I've since gone through the setup of Guacamole and tried things out - indeed, its as you state, you can isolate users pretty well. I was able to set up 3 test users, each with their own WM, and independent logins on the machine .. and it works pretty well. I can see this as being a great facility for a small-office environment that just wants to run a single machine that services multiple users, each logging in with…

I had struggles when using my iPad with Guacamole, but it works great with Chromebooks/Chromeboxes!

Re: Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

#76

Post by [deleted] »

Thaxll wrote: post #49
jitl wrote: post #7

I run Guacamole on my home network as an RDP client to my Windows and Linux boxes. It's a fantastic piece of software. It beats VMC widely in terms of speed, and RDP narrowly when used across the internet. I run guacd on my home server and use that to access my interior network from any computer. It's stable, consumes low memory, and works nicely over HTTPS with apache reverse-proxying the Java webapp. A+ amaze your…

I highly doubt it's better than an optimized protocol like RDP...

[deleted]

Re: Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

#77

Post by blutoot »

cbhl wrote: post #67
blutoot wrote: post #63

I'm thinking of the implication of something awesome like this. Hopefully in the long-run it will boost the likes of light LTE-enabled Chromebooks, at least for tech professionals. That of course requires high-speed LTE infrastructure and ISP backbones.

Eh, Chrome Remote Desktop and Fusionlabs' Chrome RDP both already allow Chromebooks to be used for remote desktops (the latter speaking actual RDP), although both are closed-source.

So then do you see any advantage of Guacamole over those two other than the open/closed-source part?

Re: Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

#78

Post by jumpwah »

jitl wrote: post #57
jumpwah wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey I'm on firefox (latest -31) on arch as well. Thing is vimeo doesn't load for me either. I do have the packages `gstreamer0.10` and `gstreamer0.10-base` installed, however in `about:plugins` in firefox, there are no plugins installed. So does this mean I have to have some such 'plugin' here for h264 to work?

Kinda. You need H.264 codec support in Gstreamer. Try installing the Gstreamer libav (an FFMPEG fork) plugin: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?name=gst-libav That should give your Gstreamer support for all formats libav supports.

Oh my I feel silly now, the package you linked is listed right in the optional deps for firefox! (Along with `gst-plugins-good` for h264 video too).

I remember being surprised that sites like dailymotion and vimeo still wouldn't work since I expected firefox to come with h264 support a while back (the whole cisco thing if I remember correctly). Always just attributed it to not having flash installed or whatever and shrugged my shoulders.

Anyways they work now, and at http://www.youtube.com/html5 it showed no h264 support before, but now it does. So thanks for the comment, without which I would have still been living in the dark. :)

Re: Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

#79

Post by kanaka »

renang wrote: post #39
desaintmartin wrote: post #17

There already have been a few nice VNC web clients around for a few years, like NoVNC ( http://kanaka.github.io/noVNC/ , python server-side, used in Openstack and others). Unfortunately, there's no magic: you need your VNC/RDP server, then your "clientless server" (proxy socket websocket or alike), then your web server to host the "clientless" client. It's becoming to be interesting when your VNC/RDP client directly…

Note that 1.4 introduced websockets support, VNC support was present much long ago. You would need a proxy tho, like the one NoVNC provides. I am still waiting better support for Clipboard on QEMU. :/ Currently using NoVNC as a client. Works really well. Keyboard needs more love.

The websocket support in QEMU allows you to connect with noVNC directly without using a websockify (proxy/bridge). You can still choose to connect to the regular VNC port using the proxy, but if you activate websockets then you can connect without it. The same is true now with libvncserver based VNC servers (e.g. x11vnc)

Re: Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

#80

Post by kanaka »

jitl wrote: post #59
desaintmartin wrote: post #17

There already have been a few nice VNC web clients around for a few years, like NoVNC ( http://kanaka.github.io/noVNC/ , python server-side, used in Openstack and others). Unfortunately, there's no magic: you need your VNC/RDP server, then your "clientless server" (proxy socket websocket or alike), then your web server to host the "clientless" client. It's becoming to be interesting when your VNC/RDP client directly…

Guacamole and NoVNC are very different conceptually. NoVNC is a client for the VNC protocol that runs in your browser, and a dumb TCP-to-Websockets proxy script that you run on your server if your VNC software doesn't already support Websockets in addition to TCP. Your browser and the server still communicate using the VNC protocol, and you'll get performance no better than TCP VNC (bad performance over the internet,…

"Guacamole has much better performance ... custom, better-performing protocol" -> What aspect of performance? Latency? Bandwidth? Server CPU and memory usage? Scaling? Do you have some actual performance benchmarks comparing the two? And does guacamole perform better when connecting to the same VNC server or is that comparing VNC server with an RDP server. RDP itself is a newer, more complex and more efficient protocol than VNC but VNC is supported pretty much everywhere. RDP could pretty easily be implemented in noVNC by somebody with the time (in fact it's been on the aspirational feature list for years).

With noVNC the protocol decode/encode is done in the browser (modern browsers are plenty fast enough to do this easily), whereas with Guacamole the burden of decode/encode for every client happens on the server where the proxy/client part is running. Even if you need to run websockify to proxy/bridge noVNC, the only thing it is doing is shuttling network traffic and the python implementation of websockify can easily handle lots of simultaneous clients without breaking a sweat.

noVNC was designed with Infrastructure as a Server (IaaS) providers in mind so minimizing server CPU, memory and bandwidth was a goal in the design.

Also, guacamole does use websockets when it is available.

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