[OpenIndiana-discuss] Vnc to mimic SunRay behaviour, how??

[Peter Tribble]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 3:23 PM, Hans J. Albertsson
<hans.j.albertsson at branneriet.se> wrote:
> I'm pretty comfy with the way SunRays work: you login to a remote server
> with a full graphical UI.
>...
> Initial tests with GB net and modern fanless media PCs indicate that VNC
> might just be good enough for the next 5 years or so. But, as far as I can
> see, using Xvnc in OI151a7 leaves you with but two choices, open-for-all
> possibly passwordprotected persistent preassigned sessions or non-persistent
> but automatically assigned sessions.
>
> Could one fiddle around with options and other things to simulate SunRay
> sessions in a better way??

Probably not out of the box, but I did this (on a much larger scale)
pretty much the same day VNC was released sometime last millenium.

Basically, a user logged into a web server, and there was a cgi script that
either (a) worked out they already had a session running, or (b) started
a new Xvnc with the required session for them, and sent back the session
details. (Most everyone had Windows, so it was some ini file I think that
the vnc client read and automatically collected them to the right session.)

All dynamic, no gdm or xdm, everything managed with the vncserver
script (or a custom variation thereof) and fully persistent. (And we very
soon added a session kill feature for users to reset hung or broken sessions.)

The trick is authentication and running as the right user. If I were doing
this today I would probably save user ssh keys and get the cgi script to
ssh into the target server as the user and run vncserver to start the session

(I wrote a custom httpd that ran as the authenticated user - this was before
apache even existed so there wasn't a lot of choice, but it's not something I
would do now.)

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/