NoMachine NX, Fedora and Terminal Services

[Mark McLoughlin]

Hey,
	I've took a more detailed look at NoMachine NX and wrote down some
details:

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

	Now, to figure out how we might go about using this for Terminal
Services in Fedora.

	My first guess is that only nxcomp, nxcompext, nxproxy, nxagent and
nx-X11 are interesting in this context. We could probably build a
package that includes all these pieces, but builds the nx-X11 package
using a patch against Xorg rather than using the entire copy of XFree86
4.30 (i.e. the way vnc is built). Anyone interested in taking this on?

	Once we have the package in place, its not immediately obvious to me
the best way to actually integrate it so that it can be easily used
nicely for terminal services. The problem here is that you want to
somehow, from the client terminal, activate an nxagent on the server,
get GDM to manage that display and then start an rfbproxy on the client
which displays to the local X server.

	The way this is done with the NoMachine pacakges is, AFAICS, through
nxclient using SSH to invoke to their proprietary nxnode/nxserver
commands on the server which does this kind of setup. We could possibly
take the same approach requiring the terminal server to have the SSH
host key of each the client machines to allow the clients to run an
nxagent. It'd be really nice to see someone try something like this
out...

	However, since one of the reasons NX is interesting is its potential
for implementing the session re-connection/mobility feature it might
make more sense to take a similar approach to the one we took for VNC -
dedicate a port for NX connections, when GDM gets an incoming connection
on that port spawn an nxagent with a login screen, keep track of NX
sessions and allow re-connections.

	Anyway, purposely leaving this hanging for now. Hopefully either
someone will take a further poke at this now or we'll re-visit it again
sometime in the future.

	(Oh, one question I forgot is whether or not NX is really interesting
for terminal services. Low bandwidth requirements might only really come
to the fore for things like connecting to your office machine from home
or a sysadmin in the head office administering a desktop in a branch
office. So, on a fast local network does NX really noticeably improve
the usability of an X terminal?)

Thanks,
Mark.