[kwlug disc.] Multi-headed Linux server

[Cedric Puddy]

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For one of my clients, we support a engineering team of about 40  
people across two different offices that share access to two  
different clusters of servers.

All the servers live in the data centres, and all the users connect  
in remotely to get their Gnome/KDE/twm desktop -- the key is VNC.

People SSH in to set up a new VNC session on one of the session-host  
servers, then connect via VNC, to their desktop and use it like they  
would any other desktop.   Most of the servers for sessions are  
single proc Athalon 2600+ machine w/ 4 Gb of RAM.  We can only  
support a few people on a given machine, because the tools people are  
running often consume 1-2Gb of RAM, so we run into RAM limitations  
pretty quick.  Kick it up to 64 bit, more processors, then you could  
get many more people.  (We have some Sun X4200 machines which are  
great machines -- very popular with both the users and IT staff, and  
actually quite cheap to boot. :)

(Yes, there are ways to make it more "friendly", but our engineers  
need ssh for other things anyway, and don't mind learning a magic  
incantation or two -- the complexity of setting up the session is  
very, very trivial compared to incantations they need in order to  
make use of the byzantine engineering application infrastructure that  
they use -- a single project involves more than a million files, a  
hundred different interdependent tools from various vendors with  
various interfaces.... Yowza.)

We also support XDMCP, but since raw X protocol freaks out at the  
slightest whiff of a dropped packet, and these guys like to put their  
laptops to sleep all the time, etc, it's not really popular.  :)

We played with NX (from nomachine) which looks *really* nice on  
paper, and when I can make it work, *is* *really* *nice*.  (for the  
those who haven't seen it - it's an Xserver that does a smart job of  
deciding what to send over the wire.  It proxies the X session via  
SSH, so it gets good encryption, public-key auth of sessions,  
disconnectability, low-bandwidth usage, no screen scraping, Citrix- 
like display caching at the remote end, etc.).

The catch is that NX seems to have some fundamental flakiness -- half  
the time I can't connect, or if I can, I can't reconnect after a  
disconnect most of the time.  Oh well.  Maybe it's just me, but I  
couldn't find any good reason or errors in the (generally rather  
good) logging, so I moved on.

On most of my machines, personally, I leave the console X server  
turned off, and if I need to do something graphical on a machine I  
just log in, type "vncserver -geometry 1024x768 -depth 24", and  
connect then with VNC -- no need to concern myself with what graphics  
card is in the machine, weather I'm local to the machine or not,  
weather I might run out of time, and come back to the task later, etc.

- -Cedric

On 8-Feb-07, at 12:59 AM, Ilguiz Latypov wrote:

>
> On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 11:38:15PM -0500, Bob Jonkman wrote:
>> At the meeting on Monday talk drifted to an idea of Brent  
>> Clement's: Get one powerful honking
>> Linux server and hang a bunch of keyboards, mouses and monitors  
>> off it, then use it as a
>> relatively cheap multi-user server.  The trick, of course, is to  
>> keep track of all the various
>> keyboard and mouse events, and make sure they all work the correct  
>> display.
>>
>> There's a bit of hardware that makes this much easier:  Ndiyo,  
>> essentially a VNC client in a
>> matchbox. See the picture on http://www.ndiyo.org/intro/summary   
>> (the Web site is awful wordy
>> for a box that's so small).  An even smaller device can be seen at
>> http://www.ndiyo.org/blog/2006/12/06/a-sneak-preview/
>
> So they moved the X Server functionality of a traditional X Window
> workstation to X Window server and embedded VNC client into a
> little box?  This would make workstations ultra-light indeed.
> Nice idea.
>
> And I guess VNC servers can run separately from the main server.
>
> I wonder if the good folks at RealVNC have found a way to encode
> shift-key events.  This isn't available in the version 4 of VNC
> client and vino 2.16.
>
> -- 
> Ilguiz
>
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    Cedric Puddy, IS Director            cedric at thinkers.org
      PGP Key Available at:              http://www.thinkers.org/cedric


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