Terminal services prototype

[Mark McLoughlin]

Hi,

On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 02:25, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> What has happened to the terminal services prototype that Mark McLoughlin published on his homepage http://
> people.redhat.com/markmc/terminal-services-demo? The webpage is no longer there and I'm still interested on this.

	So, the latest status is that I wrote this:

  http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/remote-desktop-2.html

	The latest patches are here:

  http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/code/gdm-vnc-support.patch
  http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/code/vnc-managed.patch
  http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/code/vnc-tls.patch

	And pretty much nothing has been happening with it in the last couple
of months due to lack of time.

	At GUADEC I sat down for a few hours with George Lebl (GDM maintainer)
reviewing the code so I've a bunch of notes on stuff that needs to be
fixed up before the GDM patch can go upstream. 

	George also pointed out the fact that the authentication mechanism is
very heavy (a VNC server and GDM greeter gets launched per-connection)
so this design is vulnerable to denial of service attacks. Now, XDMCP is
vulnerable in the same way so maybe its not a huge issue, but I think
before I'd go any further with the original design I'd investigate
whether we could do something like authenticate using SSH and then
secure the connection by using an SSH tunnel.

	However, long term for terminal services I think we'll be looking at
using something like NX[1] to improve networked X performance. The nice
thing about authenticating/tunnelling with SSH is that it would be
equally applicable to NX as to VNC.

HTH,
Mark.

[1] - http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/a-look-at-nomachine-nx.html