Hi,

I’m having a bit of a trouble while trying to move my CandyBar’s Library from the regular Application Support directory into my Dropbox directory. I did that move on my iMac and everything worked out pretty good. I’m now having the Library running on my Dropbox, so it’s always being synced up to the cloud.

When I open my MacBook now and change the Library path to the Dropbox directory there (since those two Macs are being kept in sync via Dropbox) I can see all libraries contents, but instead of the actual icons or docks, I only see CandyBar-file-icons in the preview. I can even double-click some item from my list to view it in detail, still, no actual icon-image, only the white paper with CandyBar logo on it.

Could you please help me on this/tell me, what’s left to be done so that my sync works? I’m not expecting both CandyBars to work simultaneously, since it would probably break the Library, but at least when I run one after another (what’s the actual use-case here) I expect everything to be in sync.

Thanks in advance,
Marius.
–
Sent from my iMac.

On Nov 17, 2009, at 3:47 AM, candybar@panic.com wrote:

Hi Marius,

It’s currently not possible with Dropbox because whichever protocol Dropbox uses does not support resource forks, which is the part of the icon file where CandyBar stores icon data.

You’ll have to compress the whole library before putting it on Dropbox to make this work.

–
Les
Panic Inc.

Hm…

Update:

On 11/17/2009 97:22AM, devilx@devilx.net wrote:

Hi,

I’m having trouble in using Dropbox in combination with a popular Mac OS X application named “CandyBar” (http://www.panic.com/candybar/). The application itself provides a way to move its existing Library into a custom location, for example right into Dropbox’s folder, unfortunately the sync over two Macs fails. Please read the appended conversation I’ve already had with one of Panic’s support guys for more information.

I would really appreciate if you could provide a bugfix for this issue, to make Dropbox even more usable than it already is.

Thanks in advance and best regards,
Marius.

On Nov 18, 2009, at 11:51 AM, support@getdropbox.com wrote:

Hi Marius,

Yup, their support person is correct.

You can work around this problem by making an archive ZIP file of the file(s) and putting the archive in the Dropbox folder. Just right-click on the file (or a whole folder of files) and select “Create Archive.” The resulting .zip file is safe to put into the Dropbox folder. You can double click on the .zip file to open it and recreate the file(s).

Are are working on this. Add your voice:

https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/4/mac-resource-fork-support#votebox:0

Best,
Kevin Chu

This means: Vote people! Vote!

Facepalm

For the past months now already I’m searching for a new desktop table, since my actual one is now already eleven years old and getting more and more ramshackly by each day passing. I’ve been at several furniture stores around me, including (of course) IKEA, Möbel Gamerdinger, Heyne Büromarkt, any some more. Also, I’ve been searching for tables on the internet at several different online-stores and even found quite a few tables that really fit my needs. The only thing that didn’t fit on any of the desks I liked was their pricing – and I really can’t understand how this could be.

What’s a desk typically contained of? Well, mostly, one big plate – in my case some rectangle one with for example 180cm x 80cm and legs, usually four in number. And actually this is essentially everything I want and need. If you would now stumble through the different (online-)stores and search for exactly such a table, you would probably be shockingly disturbed by the prices furniture stores charge for one piece of wood with four legs. Let’s take IKEA as example: They charge 179,00€ for a Galant Desktop-Table (160cm x 80cm), which is essentially only four table-legs, mounted beneath a frame which holds a plate made of pressboard – sold as a mass-production article, where the costs for fabrication probably are way under a quarter of the price they charge. Besides, at least the demonstration desks within the IKEA store were so shaky, because of their cheap built-up, that I wouldn’t want to have my iMac placed onto one of those, until I’d like to buy new hard drives every few weeks. And at last but not least: The way the table looks can hardly be called “design”.

Next store, same issue. Poorly designed desks made of cheap materials, ugly fabrication but prices within the range from two-hundred to five-hundred or even more Euros. And all I was thinking was “What’s the point?!” – there is no relation between the quality of those mass-produced tables and their prices. Don’t get me wrong, of course a lot of costs for crafting, producing, transportation and more come together – and I might not even bitch that loud if at least the materials they would use would have been real wood plates and solid steel-frames and -legs – but especially in those days I can’t see any relation between the price and the quality of those products. In my opinion, furniture stores achieved a status where they can just pull out the customer’s money off their pockets with nobody complaining about it. When some hardware producer prices its products at extremely exaggerated values you hear blogs and news-sites complaining about it. Why don’t they do so with furnitures? Are furniture-stores/-producers now already on the same level with car manufacturers and the music industry? For me, it seems so.

However, since I’m a person which works at his desk a very large amount of time and wants to feel comfortable while doing so, I’ve decided to not buy any of those mass-production-crap-desks for myself. Instead, I’m looking forward at desktops like Sublevel’s iDesk or Holmris’ Milk. Both of those tables are made of qualitatively high materials to assure stability and both look just gorgeous. Of course, those desktops are priced at a totally different level, although there’s one difference that should be kept clearly in mind: Those are no mass-products. Those desktops are custom design work, containing innovative and practical features.

I’ve already received the price listings for the different version of Milk and will yet keep looking around for a bit more, until I’ve found the table I really really really want.

Update: Yesterday I finally got a desktop table, although it was more like a spontaneous buy. I purchased the Galant table I was talking about, with the A-legs and, instead of a crappy wooden-plate, a gorgeous black glass one. For the whole table I paid around two-hundred bucks in total, what now really is a good price. Why I’m thinking so? Well, instead of the cheap and ugly want-to-be-real-wood plate I got a piece of glass which usually costs nearly two-hundred bucks itself, plus a half-way-solid frame with chrome legs that fit together pretty good. I’ve mounted the desk and yet, as I’ve expected, I’m experiencing “shocks” thru vibrations of the objects lying on the table (lamp, iMac, etc), but I’ve already found a way to screw the table’s frame to the wall behind, in an unobvious and clean way, to reduce the vibrations on the table itself. So, as I’ve said before, the table’s frame was not worth one penny, unfortunately there was no other way for me to get the glass-plate lifted to 70cm (or more) – besides building myself an own frame.

Also Still, I hope the furniture stores/industry to suffer from the depression just like the automobile industry has (and will continue to), so maybe the thinking there will change in a way to provide the people prices that fit the actual product’s quality/value someday.

An annoyed and disappointed goodbye for now.

Anyway, after that, I wanted to take a look at the Reader Zinio provides for the Mac desktop, so I just downloaded and installed it. Before the installation finished, I had to enter my account info (e-mail, password) and so I did. Unfortunately, the Zinio Reader tried to connect but failed, because of my e-mail address seemed not to be existing. I tried it a few times and checked it for typos, but everything was correctly entered.

I decided to write an e-mail to Zinio’s support. I mentioned the problems I’ve been having with the Reader and also the odd, spanish confirmation e-mail I got. Yet (after over one day), they did not answer my mail and I’m wondering whether they’re going to. I’ll just be patient.

However, does anyone know any other sites that provide the same service Zinio does? And maybe allow me to download the stuff I buy as PDF to save it on my Mac?

However, so I thought, that either there just haven’t been many themes released since I’ve last checked (afair over a year ago) or there just haven’t been any good themes that were submitted and accepted at AGO. To verify that, I’ve taken a look at the gnome-look.org themes-section and proved my assumption true: I browsed through the first few pages of the GTK 2.x section and my eyes began to hurt. Then, I sorted the section to start with the highest-rated themes and my eyes hurt even more. One theme was – in the matter of quality and usability – worse than the other. Everywhere you looked only rough-cut pixmaps thrown together, added some really-not-looking-good background images to the menus and the window elements themselves and finished it all up with a foreground-color that either provided an exaggerated or an awfully low value of contrast. Meh.

The bummer is, that the majority of all themes look like that and only a few ones, mostly created by known artists like roberTO, Jakub and others really look tasteful and qualitatively good. In my opinion, this was and still is a major problem of the whole OpenSource community. OpenSource gives you the power to choose, modify and re-distribute, but I guess that exactly this power is being used in a wrong way – not only in the matter of control themes!

In general, especially within the Linux area, there are nearly no standards. Spoken from the designers’ view, there are not enough definitions like the GNOME UI-Design Guideline or the Tango Project, which try to convince and help the developers and/or designers to draw qualitatively better themes while still keeping up the freedom to choose and create. Of course, this won’t stop misbehaving designers to submit themes to un- or sloppy-moderated sites like gnome-look.org, but still it would provide the GNOME folks a “pressurizing medium” to say “You make it the good way, your theme might make it into our official project releases or at least on the cover of the official sites!“.

Though, for a real GNU/FSF-guy this way might sound like to much of “controlling” and “regulating” and by that lead to an operating system like for example Mac OS X (no, not Windows, there you have an even bigger problem regarding applications that look totally different than others) is. Still, most of these guys forget, that without at least a little bit of guide-lining, regulating and separating the wheat from the chaff especially the Linux Desktop will never make it into a higher market-share. There definitely is a reason, why companies like Novell and Red Hat keep up the hard and cost-intense work on their own UI-designs and improvements. If you want the users to be convinced about using a clean and stable operating system, you cannot simply stick with a UI on which the users’ thoughts are “Uh.” from the first click they’re doing. And of course, tastes are different and each user has a different one, but in one point all users will share the same opinion: An UI needs to be tidy and neat. No pixels. No exaggerated anti-aliasing (which should be better called “blur” in 90% of the existing GTK themes). Just a sleek and intuitive interface with clean structures and without distracting or even deranging elements (… like black backgrounds, white foregrounds and pixmaps that remind you of some white-noise-graph).

On software techniques the GNOME community seems to finally has understood what KDE is doing for years now already. There has to be a clean infrastructure (or backbone or whatever you’d like to call it) for solving problems and providing features. GNOME has started the move to GStreamer some years ago and now finally also moved to a backend (PulseAudio) which provides such an infrastructure. Also, introducing D-BUS and the HAL was a big step for the whole Desktop-Project, and the Gnome VFS seems to be trying to really compete with KDE’s now. So, as it seems, developers have finally recognized, that (especially in enterprise use) a desktop with no integration and where each application works different and uses a different infrastructure for providing audio, video or whatever else will never succeed against “the big ones”.

Unfortunately, in the matter of UI design, it still seems to take a while until contributors understand that it’s worthless drawing themes that look like Vista’s interface printed on a dot-matrix printer. By that, users of other desktop systems will always keep looking and thinking of Linux to be an unstable and totally not-integrative desktop-system, hacked together by some crazy, long-bearded freaks. Because for low-brown users, the UI is an essential element that helps them deciding whether a system looks usable to them or not. With an interface where each application looks the same, acts the same and allows the user to get this work done in an undisturbing way – and maybe adds a little bit of pleasure with smooth and clean looking effects (and by that I don’t think of wobbly windows!) – even someone that’s new to the matter will be able to get in touch with it quite fast.

I’m still waiting for the day on which especially GNOME’s interface-nazis finally make the move and decline all applications that do not strictly follow clearly defined designing guidelines for a clean and usable UI – even if it would throw out half of the applications shipped with a regular GNOME desktop (like Pidgin, OpenOffice.org, and so on…). Until then, I guess that Linux itself can be as solid as a rock, as fast as a lightening and free as free beer – it won’t be able to increase its popularity and climb the higher market-shares. Just because of the “look and feel”, which sometimes is just more important then pure functionality. Else, we would still be working on the CLI, wouldn’t we?

// btw: This is my 500th post I’ve been writing within over four years now already. Heh.

I need to create a minimalist base-system for a project and have been given the strategical requirement of using Ubuntu Server for my installation. It’s not actually the distribution me or any other team-member would have preferred, but I thought “it can’t be that worse, it’s based on Debian and it’s hard to break something that good“. But of course, today I’ve been disabused about that.

The first thing is, that it’s very hard to strip down the default Ubuntu Server installation, to make it as minimal as possible. You have to fuck around with many dependencies that seemed to be there only because some maintainers thought how cool it would be to compile every bleeding-edge feature into that application, regardless if it’s really useful on a Server-Distribution (as they call it) or not. But let me clarify a bit what I mean with “fuck around with dependencies”…

On a standard, “minimal” installation with no extras selected in tasksel, this is what has to be removed additionally after the setup:


aptitude --purge-unused purge apparmor apparmor-utils bash-completion bind9-host dnsutils ubuntu-standard ubuntu-minimal bzip2 command-not-found command-not-found-data console-setup console-terminus dmidecode laptop-detect tasksel tasksel-data dosfstools eject ethtool fdutils file friendly-recovery ftp fuse-utils ntfs-3g gnupg python-gnupginterface ubuntu-keyring update-manager-core hdparm info inputattach installation-report iputils-arping iputils-tracepath libbind9-30 libbz2-1.0 lsb-release python python-apt python-central python-gdbm python-support python2.5 ufw libcurl3-gnutls libexpat1 librpc-xml-perl libxml-parser-perl libfribidi0 libfuse2 libgc1c2 w3m libgc1c2 libgcrypt11 libgnutls13 libldap-2.4-2 libopencdk10 libgpg-error0 libgpmg1 libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tree-perl libwww-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libidn11 libisc32 libdns32 libisccfg30 libisccc30 libiw29 wireless-tools libldap-2.4-2 liblwres30 liblzo2-2 libmagic1 libntfs-3g23 libopencdk10 libparted1.7-1 parted libreadline5 wpasupplicant librpc-xml-perl libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules libsqlite3-0 libsysfs2 pcmciautils libtasn1-3 libterm-readkey-perl liburi-perl libusb-0.1-4 lshw usbutils libwww-perl libx11-6 xauth libxmuu1 libxext6 libx11-data libxau6 libxcb-xlib0 libxcb1 libxdmcp6 libxext6 libxml-parser-perl libxmuu1 lsof memtest86+ mii-diag mime-support mlocate mtr-tiny nano netcat netcat-traditional ntpdate pcmciautils perl perl-modules popularity-contest ppp pppconfig pppoeconf python python-apt python-gnupginterface python-minimal
python-support python2.5-minimal readline-common reiserfsprogs rsync startup-tasks sudo system-services tasksel tasksel-data time ubuntu-keyring ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-standard upstart upstart-compat-sysv upstart-logd usbutils util-linux-locales vim-common vim-tiny wget wireless-tools wpasupplicant x11-common xkb-data at ed iptables linux-server pciutils


After that, the system is still something around four-hundred Megabytes large and contains over one-hundred-thirty packages. You removed “gnupg”, because it has an extreme amount of additional features/dependencies which seem just useless for 99% of the cases on a server-system (e.g. ldap), but of course this will also automatically remove the ubuntu-keyring – what is kinda not fun. However, after searching for an stripped down package of gnupg, you will notice that there is none but gpgv. Unfortunately this tool can’t be used in combination with apt-key, what makes the whole GPG/Keyring stuff unusable. The only compromise you have, is to stick with gpgv and manually update the keyring, since gpgv can only verify but not update the GPG stuff.

Now, after executing the purge-command, you will be prompted to type in “I am aware that this is a very bad idea“. Not because you are removing an essential package which causes your system not to reboot anymore (upstart), just because you remove python-minimal. When I saw, that neither the upstart- nor sysvinit-packages had the “Essential: yes”-flag set, I was really shocked. That should be Linux for Human Beings? A Linux which lets you delete /sbin/runlevel and /sbin/init without even complaining about it? Holy crap.

So, after manually installing sysvinit, we need some editor (no, not nano, that’s not an editor!) to modify our sources list. Since Emacs is quite big and bloated, vi (no, not vim, n v i) is probably a good choice. After installing it and opening APT’s sources list, we will see many entries we do not want (multiverse, universe, whateververse), since they are barely supported and provide no security-updates. After removing everything but “main”, we execute aptitude update and continue installing the software we actually need.

Next, we would like to have the versioning-tool rcs, for handling the configuration files we will need to change. Also, we might want an mc (midnight commander) for performing filesystem operations and navigation. Unfortunately now, we just found the next problem: We can’t install them. There is no installation candidate for these package-names. Why? Simply because they are not in “main”. I can’t tell you why, and I can’t tell anyone who could, but these packages are contained in “universe”.

However… let’s move on. So, we fight ourselves through the configuration and stuff and in the end there are only some peanuts left to be set-up. An example could be, the locale and keymap settings. So, let’s begin with the keymap. We would like to have the keymap #150 (German, Latin1, Qwertz). We check the installed packages and see that console-tools are installed on our system. We browse the net and find out, that (for changing the keymap), we only need to execute dpkg-reconfigure console-data. Before we can do that, we need to install it. And I think you know what comes next…. right. It’s not possible. This is another (elementary) package, which is not contained in “main”, but instead it can be found in “universe”. For no reason, in my opinion. But okay, since we really need it, we manually download it from the “universe”-repository and install it. Now, we try executing the dpkg-reconfigure command: The command runs, finishes, and doesn’t display any errors or warnings. “Great!“, we think. Unfortunately, after rebooting the machine, our thought became more like an “Wtf?!“, since the keymap didn’t change at all. After some more trying, searching and debugging, we find out, that there’s some script which calls some install-keymap command, which of course we can’t find on our system. Unfortunately, the calling script doesn’t show any error, if the command can’t be executed/found, what let’s us think, that everything went just fine. After searching on packages.ubuntu.com for the binary, we find out that it’s contained in a package named console-common. Which, again, is only available in universal. So, up to now, we got already five packages which we will have to maintain manually, since they’re not in “main” for no frikkin’ reason. That’s Linux for Human Beings.

After finally installing the last required package and successfully changing the keymap, we can now focus on the locale. On a regular Debian, the only command needed for selecting which locales to be built and which to be used is dpkg-reconfigure locales. Let’s take a look at what has to be done on the Ubuntu Server:

First, we need to manually insert the locales we would like to be built into the file /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local. One on each line. After that, we execute the command mentioned for the Debian system, which only builds us the locales. After that, we edit the /etc/default/locale and insert the LANG we would like to be used. And then we might execute update-locale and reboot the system. This is how locales are being handled on the Linux for Human Beings. Again, for comparison, on a Debian the only command you need to know is dpkg-reconfigure locales. And reboot. But that’s all.

Personally, the installation today taught me, that Ubuntu might be a nice (and very bloated) operating system for Desktop computing, but in the Server area it still lacks the knowledge of seeing the point and really simplifying the administration of a machine, instead of complicating everything by using obscure dependencies, odd tools and a package management which keeps out rock-solid and widely spread software of its “stable” package-branch.

At the moment, it would call it “EPIC FAIL“, to cite my buddy M. Pain.

The second thing is the more and more used Shockwave/Flash stuff. With Firefox, I can play videos on YouTube smooth, fluent and with not-that-much CPU load, while the Epiphany nearly hangs up when playing such videos, produces a very high CPU load and the videos itselves studder so that it’s really no fun to watch them.

The third thing that became really annoying is the crashing. My Epiphany keeps on crashing while browsing especially sites with much content or Flash components. That’s really annoying, and the only advantage is, that Epiphany now aks whether to recover the lost session. But even this can become one’s doom when Epiphany re-loads exactly that site what made it crash and understandably hangs up/crashes, again. You can’t even click on the [X]-button, since the interface stops reacting as soon as it’s being displayed. It’s a bummer.

Now I’ve started using Iceweasel for sites that might crash Epiphany and became even more disappointed about the whole stuff. I thought that Epiphany using the Webkit version could maybe solve my problems, but unfortunatelly it’s still very unstable development code and besides, it doesn’t have any Flash-plugins yet. So I think I’m forced to start using Mozilla’s original, even if I dislike it. The freedom to choose (a.k.a. OpenSource) really is a big deal when you have ten products, out of which eight are not using the toolkit you’re working with/do not integrate at all into your desktop, and the preffered one of the two choices left doesn’t do the job at all. On this situation, I say, feel free to restrict me to one choice, which at least integrates and works the way I expect it – talking about Safari on the Mac.

By the way: Webkit is the way to go. Forget this damn Gecko engine.

Thanks to tuhl for this info.

… of course, I was just joking. Crap. *grml*

Gwibber on my GNOME Desktop

Just tried out Gwibber and I gotta say that it’s a pretty nice and smooth-looking Twitter client for the GNOME Desktop. It’s written in Python and uses GTK2 in combination with Webkit to display the eye-candy-tweets. It was pretty much a pain to get the Ubuntu-Packages working on Debian, but now it’s running pretty good and yet it seems stable. I’m wondering where to configure the appearance, hm… well, however.

Just try it out yourself!

Don’t get my wrong, I’m not saying that VirtualBox is crap, because it’s not. As OpenSource and “easy to use” desktop-virtualization it is great. You install it, hope that the setup builds you the kernel-modules the right way and just run it. After that you can easily create a new Windows XP guest and just use it over an NAT-interface to communicate with your other infrastructure from within the xVM. But heaven forbit if you’d like to join your xVM Windows XP to a Windows Domain – happy bridging!

VirtualBox is still too much fussing around with Operating System low-levels, what is completely user-unfriendly and doesn’t make things for an experienced person easier.

Still, I’m waiting for KVM to advance.

My Idea of the Perfect Terminal-Server Infrastructure. Click to download the PDF.

Some time ago I was involved in a project at work that made me think a bit about the infrastructure companies use and how they could look like, in a perfect world. It became clear, that many companies tried and still try to move their infrastructure to free software – modern web-services with Apache and Mono, virtualization with Xen (at least before Citrix was there), desktop-virtualization with VirtualBo…errr.. Sun’s xVM, and so on. Unfortunatelly, these things actually do not bring many advantages to the end-user but maybe giving them a better feeling because of not-throwing monopolists the company’s money into their throats. The fact is, that the low-brow-user doesn’t really care or even see whether there’s a KVM or a VMware running as host for the server he’s just working on. So, how about bringing free software to the enterprise desktop? I’m not talking about buying a SLED license-box. I’m talking of opensource service on which end-users can actually do their daily work.

Correct me if I should be wrong, but as far as I noticed nowadays Citrix is one of the widest spread solutions when it comes to terminal-servers – how should it be else as inventor of the Independent Computing Architecture. And of course, there are good reasons why Citrix covers the market in that area: it is a great product which allows many different users to work at the same time on one (or more) Windows Servers and, besides of that, also supports redundancy – what is the non-plus-ultra when it comes to enterprise. And in theory, everything works out great with no SPF (Single Point of Failure) and the highly compressed ICA protocol allows comfortable working, even over thin lines. Though, in practice, it doesn’t work out as smooth as it’s read in the brochure. For example, I don’t like how redundancy is being solved in the ICA/Citrix Terminal-Server solutions. In my opinion, the client’s configuration is not the place to store what terminal-servers are available, and it should not be left to the client to decide to which it connects. As soon as you slacken your infrastructure and allow employees to connect using clients on their own managed workstations, you lose control about the redundancy configuration and what is more important, you also lose control about load-balancing. When an employee only configures one terminal-server, the client will always connect to this one, regardless whether it’s fully crowded while the second one is twirling one’s thumbs.

Besides, I find it pretty hard to administer two or more identical Windows Servers, since the installation-routines of each tiny little software under Windows works in a different way than the others before. You can’t just Keyboardcast each installation-command to each of the two (or how many Terminal-Servers are being used) Servers and verify that everything installed fine afterwards. I’m not saying that a Unix or a Linux is the perfect Terminal-Server, but in my opinion a Windows is really hard to manage – and more than one are a disaster. Of course, there are tools and services which provide you the feature of distributing a software onto many windows machines “with one click“, but usualy they require some pre-configuration and testing, until it works out really smooth. What, in the end, costs more time (and by that also money) than just executing the according aptitude, zypper or yum command on each of the <variable> servers.

My idea was, to set up the whole terminal-server infrastructure that’s usually provided by some Citrix Metaserver Product (or whatever) using simple and free tools. In this example, I based the whole scenario on Linux as server system and NoMachine as desktop protocol. In my opinion, NoMachine isn’t perfect (in no way, never), but it definitely is the best opensource-equivalent to ICA that’s available nowadays.
Unfortunately, you can’t make up an enterprise-ready terminal-server solution just by taking these two (Linux, NoMachine) products and throw them together. For example, the setup would be totally missing the one thing I just complained about before at Citrix’s solution: Redundancy. NoMachine (short, NX) itself is no terminal-server solution, just to clearify that. And it’s not described like that anywhere. NX provides remote desktop access over very thin lines with comfortable quality and speed. Period. And this explains why the redundancy of NX is quite limited. But let’s go into greater detail:

When a NX Client connects to a remote desktop, the machine running that desktop usually contains of three core services: One NX Server, one NX Node and one SSH daemon. The Client connects to the SSH daemon using a special NX-user and the SSH key that has been exchanged at the installation. From there, it authenticates against the NX Server using the credentials passed to the NX Client. If the authentication succeeds, the NX Server then forwards the connection to the NX Node, which does the actual desktop management (starting the GNOME or whatever desktop and transmitting the information to the client, etc.).
NoMachine now supports the nice feature of redundancy and load-balancing between the NX Server and the NX Node(s). For example, you could outsource the NX Node service on another machine, then clone that machine (of course, change things like the IP, Hostname, etc.) and afterwards configure the NX Server to forward connections to the newly created NX Node-Machines. The NX Server then decides where each client connects to, by paying attention to the load of each node and periodically checking its availabillity. So, if node A would already run one connection, the NX Server would send the second incoming client to node B. If node A would break down, the Server would notice that and send newly incoming connection only to node B, until it “sees” node A online again.

Now, with these informations in mind we could already create a very simplistic Linux/NoMachine Terminal-Server. But, as I was saying before, we would be missing full redudancy. In the described scenario, the NX Server would be our SPF, and we could not change that since the NoMachine configuration doesn’t provide such a feature. It would not even be possible to provide it – unless we add one more service in between the client and the server. And this is what I’ve done in the scenario I made up (see the picture, click to download the PDF). I called that service the “Rendezvous NoMachine Proxy”, because it uses the zeroconf services to communicate with the clients. Like I said at Citrix’s solution before, I don’t like configuring the available terminal-server statically within each client – of course, it doesn’t bring complexity, but it brings many other disadvantages. However, the RNP would contain a list of all available NX Servers and be able to dynamically decide whether a client is allowed to connect to one specific server or not (-> implementation of simple ACLs). The clients would use Zeroconf to find all available RNP servers and randomly take one to ask for an NX Server to connect to. The RNP would then check the NX Servers’ statuses and by that decided which server to return to the client. The client would then continue the regular procedure of authenticating against the NX Server and pass over to the NX Node, if successful.

But what are the actual advantages of this idea? Okay, to summarize them up: First of all, the whole solution would have complete redundancy. Each service would be available two or more times. The second advantage of this built-up is, that by using an extra service (RNP), the NoMachine software itself doesn’t need to be modified or even rewritten. The only modification that’s needed to be done would affect the NX Client. Instead of just connecting to the IP given in the configured session, the client would need to ask for an NX Server IP through the RNP before the regular login procedure could be started. And this would just need a hook and no modification of the whole client that would make it unmaintainable. The NX Node/Server components already provide configurable hooks for scripts that get executed before the actual connection starts, so it should not take more than a feature-request for that to get implement into the client, too.
However, another big advantage would be the centalization of the actual remote desktop services and the outsource-abillity of the clients. For example, the NX Servers and Nodes would be located centrally at a datacenter, while the clients could be located in many different places, subdivided in little groups. At each place at least two RNPs should be running, which check where the clients are allowed to connect to. So, to visualize the scenario a bit: The group sitting in Boston is responsible for development. A Client wants to connect and asks one RNP for a NX Server address. The RNP then notices that it’s a developer who requests a NX Session, so he will look up his ACL and summarize the NX Server to which a developer is allowed to connect. Then, the RNP checks the NX Servers’ statuses and returns a session-configuration to the client which is then used to connect.
From the group based in Miami and responsible for finances, some employee requests a terminal-server session. Again, the RNP there looks up what NX Servers are configured and where the guy’s allowed to connect to and returns the session-configuration.

There are many more advantages of such a built-up. To detail each would take me too much time and just flood this Blog entry, heh.

At last but not least, there’s one part I didn’t mention up to now: The “Internet”-area displayed in the PDF. That one contains of two Citrix Windows Terminal-Servers. Now you might be asking.. wtf? I thought we wanted to opensource and crap?!… well. In a perfect world, the last portion of the document wouldn’t be needed. But in real life, Windows is an important part and in the majority of cases it can’t be just be cut out of the infrastructure. As long as companies need to work with solutions like SAP or other Windows-Only software it is not possible to get rid of it. And this would be the only neat possibility of combining both worlds, in my opinion.

However, feel free to comment on my idea, improve and even try to implement it. I would really like to see this (or something similar) working someday. It shouldn’t be pretty hard to build the needed service and make the modifications needed for this to work.

So now I’m actually still waiting for a version of Compiz which actually supports DualHead using XRandR, what would be just great. Especially on high load it’s a pain to work on my T40p using a non-hardware-accelerated WindowManager like Metacity. But there is one cool thing about the new Compiz version I got: I can now select Emerald as WindowDecorator (instead of the regular GtkWindowDecorator) – not that I would want to do that, but still it’s a nice-to-have.
However, besides the Compiz stuff I also upgraded to GNOME Do! 0.5 and I must say that I really like the new prefs dialog. Unfortunatelly the plugins I wrote aren’t compatible with 0.5 yet, but I will try to rewrite them as soon as I’ll find the motivation to do so. The only motivation I have at the moment is, to go to Vegas and buy a convertible. But whatever.
Despite the cool new Do!-release I’m still wondering why the hack everyone’s (see: Monologue) making such a big deal out of Do! ? Don’t get me wrong: It is great software, it’s a cool and useful utility for everyday work and I really like Do!, but still I don’t know why David is now being praised as a godlike just because he ported an idea that has already been for years available on Mac to the GNOME Desktop? It definitely is a great tool and I appreciate what David did and still does, though I don’t think that “his ideas” and theories about usabillity are such a big novelty, since the core-concept already existed before.
Well, however, I guess I already got used to the fact that Feeds like Monologue started becoming more and more kinda “I’VE WRITTEN THREE LINES OF LEET C# CODE THAT WILL CHANGE THE WHOLE OPENSOURCE COMMUNITY”-way. Don’t take it personal.

Not that it only installs the packages but it also seems to work just as it should. So, no need to upgrade the other packages! Yay.

//edit: … or, you could download my freshly built deb-Packages that should be installable without a problem under SID.

Download: gnome-do-0.4.0.1-0~dx1.deb
Download: gnome-do-plugins-0.4.0.1-0~dx1.deb
Download: gnome-do-plugins-rhythmbox-0.4.0.1-0~dx1.deb