Copyright © 2008 Ola Lundqvist
Last updated: Tue Jan 01 13:50:32 2008 (CET).
Author: Ola Lundqvist
URL: http://www.opal.dhs.org/docs/vnc4winterm.oml
Administrator: webmaster@inguza.net
| Vnc and terminal server | Vnc connection to a windows terminal server. |
OBSERVE! It is now possible to use rdesktop to directly connect to a windows 2000 and windows 2003 terminal server. You do not have to do this complicated and CPU-consuming process. I'll keep it here for reference.
The summer (year 2000) I worked for a small company (EuroNetics) and one of my projects was to solve the windows problem they had. The problem was that they wanted to get rid of windows and install debian Linux instead. But still they needed some programs that only run under windows. The basic idéa was to make the administration of windows as easy as possible. You have probably installed a windows box and found that it is very time consuming. With just four computers the situation is really annoying. Some programs installed on just one computer. Some are not updated, and so on...
To solve this problem I installed a windows terminal server 2000, and set it up to allow simultaneous users. Yes this is a quite expensive solution, but a lot cheaper than Citrix. Here are some things to think about when you do that.
- Priority the users (not the administrator).
- Do not install anything more than the terminal server pack unless you know what that means. I installed some more and did never succeeded to uninstall it, so I had to install everything from scratch.
- Make it as simple as possible.
- Update with the security pack (but that does not affect this) just to be sure.
2.1 VNC
When that is done you have to install the windows vnc binary.
2.2 Users
Now create the user accounts you want on your system. And set some passwords. These passwords are not needed more than for the loopback described below.
2.3 Loopback
Now comes the real trick. If you install the client binary on the server you can actually connect the server back to itself. This allows multiple users to run at the same time.
So log in as administrator and make connections for each user.
- Set up the client so that it remembers the password (and now you can forget it). This is not possible if you have installed to much of the terminal server functionality, like the special network model (I do not remember the name of it).
- On each user start vnc (and make a link to vnc from autostart).
- Set up passwords in vnc for each user and let each user have a separate vnc display number (between 0 and 99).
- Log in and out to check that it is set up correctly.
Now add the connections to autostart for the administrator.
So now if you just log in as administrator all will be set up .
2.4 Linux
On the Linux side I set up the gnome log in screen to have a vnc option. From there I probed for the resolution and changed the X-setup and run a new X-server with that resolution and after that I run vnc in full screen. This was really neat because I could tell that it was a Linux box in a quick glance.
This solution have some drawbacks, and therefore I'm still not complete with this project.
The most obvious drawback is that vnc just uses too much bandwidth. The problem is not the network in our case. The problem was that the server used too lot of the processing capabilities for simple network transporting so it did not get enough time for actual computation. The most irritating thing was that the mouse pointer did not update fast enough and that did slow down the working speed dramatically.
One other issue was that the users had to be instructed not to use the start menu to log out. Because if you do that the connection will be lost and the administrator manually (physically or via vnc) have to go to the server and connect the user again.
It worked quite fine but the conclusion I draw from this is that it can not be used in a production environment. It is perfect for short time sessions but it is not feasibly for a daily user.
Copyright © 2008 Ola Lundqvist |
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