Cloud platform

[epsolon77]

I'll have to check again, but I don't think freenx uses the standard RDP protocol. It uses the NX remote client software, which is blazingly fast and free. It's a shame the link went down, I hope it will be up soon. In the meantime if you want to PM me your email address I'll see if I can pull my file up and send it to you. Installing installing an NX server on top of LTSP would provide the functionality you are looking for. Local thin clients would boot off the server via PXE boot, then remote users can access the same server session via freeNX which is free, open source and available on all platforms. The small issue with this might be that the base desktop would be ubuntu and not windows. In my opinion not a huge deal, but that may be one of the schools requirements. If it is you can try to run a Virtualbox instance at each local startup running whatever flavor of windows you would like. Licensing could get expensive though on the windows side of this.

[Denbert]

I'll have to check again, but I don't think freenx uses the standard RDP protocol. It uses the NX remote client software, which is blazingly fast and free..

I followed this https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FreeNX

and did the changes to port 8888.

For some strange reason it works whitout a glitch on local lan, but I cant connect from internet. My Firewall is set to forward TCP/UDP port 8888 to the LTSP server.

Must be something with me, changing from 2 nics to one nic.

My /etc/network/interfaces:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
#auto eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
    address 192.168.9.12
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    network 192.168.9.0
    broadcast 192.168.9.255
    gateway 192.168.9.254

And dhcp3 server i working and has this in /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf:

#
# Default LTSP dhcpd.conf config file.
#

authoritative;

subnet 192.168.9.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
    range 192.168.9.100 192.168.9.250;
    option domain-name "hegnstoften.net";
    option domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;
    option broadcast-address 192.168.9.255;
    option routers 192.168.9.254;
#    next-server 192.168.0.1;
#    get-lease-hostnames true;
    option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
    option root-path "/opt/ltsp/i386";
    if substring( option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9 ) = "PXEClient" {
        filename "/ltsp/i386/pxelinux.0";
    } else {
        filename "/ltsp/i386/nbi.img";
    }
}

What have I missed?

[epsolon77]

When you say it works from the local lan, are you referring to the LTSP PXE boot or using FreeNX from a self booting OS. I understand you can make the LTSP server work with one nic, but I highly recommend moving it to two nics, one for all the thin clients, and one for internet facing services. This may be my inexperience as an IT person, but I found it much easier and more stable.

[Denbert]

When you say it works from the local lan, are you referring to the LTSP PXE boot or using FreeNX from a self booting OS.

It works in both PXE and in the FreeNX client from a Windows Client

I understand you can make the LTSP server work with one nic, but I highly recommend moving it to two nics, one for all the thin clients, and one for internet facing services. This may be my inexperience as an IT person, but I found it much easier and more stable.

Yeps, The real setup ( If I can convince the School headmaster to go Linux instead of Windows) will also be with two nics

[epsolon77]

I wonder if it is in your port forwarding. I think free NX requires it's own port for each connection. It starts at whatever the set is an increments up 1 for each new session. I would check to make sure you have your incoming ports 8888 to at least 9000 open and forwarded, and make sure the recursive is ported through the same IP.

Not to throw a stick in the mud, but one advantage to a windows terminal server environment is it's extendability onto multiple machines to cope with the load. I'm sure there is a way to do this with freeNX, but I'm not sure what that would be. You might want to look into ways to extend freeNX into a front end and backend solution to see if it's possible.

[epsolon77]

We have been using Proxmox for a while now and mixing KVM and OVZ has been great. The new 1.4 currently beta version supports improved storage options which will open up the high availability options.

At the risk of hijacking, what gets unclear for me with the clouds, grids, clusters, hypervisors, virtual machines etc is how they all hang together with the various implementations and vague definitions. Most seem to allow the movement of live VMs from a host to another host, some with intervention and some automatically. Usually one box of processors can run many VMs and share common storage with other hosts etc

For me though, it feels like true cloud computing ought to be an autonomous self healing environment. A bunch of mixed hardware playing nicely with each other and sharing resource as needed. If hardware fails then it should quietly die off without losing a VM and the cloud should let you know.

A bit like a cluster of hardware acting as a single instance host that is running many VMs.

Is that too simplistic a view? Does it exist in FOSS world?

Sorry it took me so long to reply kevin...

I have not been able to test systems yet because I don't have any virtual capable processors, and only 1 64 bit processor to test on.

Currently it seems like eucalyptus and proxmox may be self healing to an extent. The question I have comes down to where and how virtual machines are run. Granted this is in part because I do not have resources to test. I can not determine if a virtual instance is run on one machine, or many. If it is running only on one hardware platform, and that hardware platform failed, I am unsure if the system would recover the VM elsewhere and keep going or not. I know VMware has their live migration and high availability utilities that allow this, but I can't test any free software yet to see if they will do this. However the owners of the company I work for have been asking to get these features implemented. This means I need a test environment to at least test the VMware stuff, so I can test proxmox and others to see how they do too. I will keep you updated.

[Denbert]

I'll make a new tread with the FreeNX issue, as this is a Cloud thread

[dion9]

Check out this company from Switzerland, they provide a really good service.
Just finished with the trail version.

Xcloud - Mac OS X Server Hosting on Parallels Mac Bare Metal Edition

www.innofield.com

[rsgooch]

I use Sun's Virtualbox for virtual server deployments and it works well. Stable, Fast and easy to setup with the GUI. I use most of the vm headless so I configure them from the command line.

I have been very happy with the product. I have 2 Windows 2k3 servers one of then running MS SQL 2008 the other is a DC. I have a small 10 users windows xp based terminal server also running in a Virtualbox VM and it works great (using xp unlimited for terminal services).

I hope this helps.