Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

I’m partway through putting together new packages for NoMachine’s NXServer 1.5.0 product line. These are the commercially-licensed editions that FreeNX provides a GPL’d alternative to. They should be done soon, and then I can test FreeNX against them to see where my remote connectivity problems lie.

For everyone as confused as I was about why Sven Wegener on Planet Gentoo was complaining yesterday about QA about an Apache package we removed eight months ago, the answer is that he wasn’t. It looks like Planet Gentoo decided yesterday to republish old articles from Sven’s unmaintained blog (his last entry was 8 months ago)

I’ve been testing the weekend’s install of the opensource NX 1.5.0 components with FreeNX 0.5.0 over slow(ish) links (OpenVPN over ADSL), and I’m personally not happy with the results today. Running over faster connection (OpenVPN over 802.11g) is absolutely fine, but connecting to my home desktop from a wifi hotspot in Starbucks … no luck.

Attempting to connect to a suspended session results in the session getting killed. My guess at this stage is that FreeNX is killing the session’s controlling nxagent after a timeout period that’s too short, but I need to investigate futher. It could be that the timeout’s being exceeded because nxagent is actually crashing or terminating for some reason. Either way, the suspended session can’t be resumed, leaving a lot of desktop apps in limbo until they’re manually terminated or the box is rebooted. I don’t feel that’s good enough.

I’ll do some more digging tomorrow, and see if I can improve my understanding of what is going on and why.

After many months of neglecting them, I’ve started working on updating the ebuilds in Portage for NX Server et al. This bug contains full ebuilds for the free components of NX 1.5.0, thanks to Jon Scruggs. Aron Griffis has already committed his own ebuilds to Portage for everything needed except net-misc/nx-x11 and nxserver-freenx-0.5.0.

The results so far have been mixed.

On the positive side, session suspend and resume really works, and sessions continue to run when disconnected. I can’t stress how useful this is - I can leave my desktop session running at home, and just connect to it from wherever I am during the day. Think “screen”, but for X11. Performance feels as good as ever, which I’m grateful for. (I once used NX via a satellite feed from a ship in the middle of the Carribean to connect to home, and despite the very poor connection, the desktop was very usable).

On the negative side, the Windows client won’t start a second time after disconnecting from a session until the PC has been rebooted; I haven’t spotted why yet. After rebooting and reconnecting to a running session, the keyboard didn’t work at all. I’m hoping to do more tests from other Windows PCs to see if the problem’s just with my laptop or not. The Linux client doesn’t have this problem, fortunately. But … I’ve seen the display corrupt a few times when using Firefox (the app I’ve used most since installing NX 1.5.0 and FreeNX 0.5.0). A quick minimise and restore fixes it, so it’s not a major problem.

My two dev boxes are still packed away from my recent re-cabling of my computer room at home. Once they’re back up and running, I’ll get the ebuilds added to Portage. I’ll also update the ebuilds for the commercial nxserver products, and see if my nxclient problems also happen with them instead of freenx. I also need to add support for modular X11. That’s been held up because I wasn’t able to get modular X11 working in my VMware Workstation environment. Now I have X11 up and running on real hardware, I’m hoping that I won’t have the same trouble second time around.

… and I must have been too busy at work; I saw the rumours last week, but I must have missed the coverage yesterday when the release actually happened. After some teething trouble with the download site (and an email to VMware about it), I’ve finally been able to snag a copy of both the Windows and Linux binaries to play with.

The Virtual Machine Center includes a number of virtual machines ready to download and use from other distributions. Wouldn’t it be great to see Gentoo in that list?

With both VMware Player and VMware Server (formerly VMware GSX Server) now available for free, I’m puzzling a bit over the future of VMware Workstation. If VMware Server can create virtual machines (ie it’s not crippled in any way), then I wonder why most people would choose to purchase Workstation?

I guess the jury is still out on whether it’s a smart move by VMware or not. Is it just a reaction to Xen (and does that mean that Xen maintains the initiative)? Is VMware (which is owned by EMC) conceeding smaller installations (where Xen must be hurting margins), and instead hoping that an engineering focus on the high-end ESX product will allow them to maintain a competitive advantage over Xen? (And this at a time when EMC is trying to tell everyone that it loves small business (Bye bye Dantz, I for one will morn your passing) One of the strengths of using VMware in the enterprise are the tools that will take a physical server and create a virtual copy of it. Many of our clients at work rely heavily on this; I’ve not come across anything like that for Xen to date.

It would be nice to get an ebuild for VMware Server into the tree; there’s been a request for such an ebuild for the older GSX Server product for some time now

Fun fun fun!

AccessFS from Olaf Dietsche caught my interest in today’s Linux Weekly News. It allows the system administrator to restrict access to a network port based on user/groupid, so that daemons no longer need to run as the root user.

This is one of the examples included in the patch:

# mount -t accessfs none /proc/access
# chown www /proc/access/net/ip/bind/80
# chown mail /proc/access/net/ip/bind/25

I haven’t had chance to try it (and don’t know if I ever will), but it looked like an interesting idea.

Work has taken over my life this week. Don’t rely on me being around until sometime late next week.