On the one hand, VMware seems to me, especially when running Windows as Guest OS way slower than Parallels. At least from what I’ve tested it seems to be having way more disk I/O and by that produce a heavier load to the Mac. Parallels on the other hand seems to be better performing, but yet it still looks like it’s mostly just “hacked together”. It doesn’t integrate that smooth with my Mac and permanently keeps my Firewall asking me whether to allow its daemons to receive connections. VMware’s look-and-feel is just way better than Parallels’.

On the other hand again, VMware’s Fusion doesn’t provide an iPhone App, what’s definitely a Plus for Parallels. But VMware then again provides me with kind of a virtual appliance store, where I can find pre-installed VMs – many even for free.

Update: So, I’ve just installed Windows 7 on both virtualization-solutions now. The average time for installation was approximately the same and even the performance is not such a big difference. What I’ve noticed: VMware is slower in rendering the Aero-effects while Parallels is slower in disk I/O-related things. I can’t really proof this, it’s just a feeling I get when using the VMs.

Huh, I don’t know. Any comments? I would like to see some in-detail 1:1-comparizon between Fusion 3 and Parallels Desktop 5 Mac, although I don’t think I’ll find something like that…

Update #2: Now, I’ve also installed the latest openSuSE 11.2 on both and was astonished by Parallels’ speed for copying, unpacking and installing 2.8GB of RPMs within around 11 Minutes. I guess the I/O argument isn’t valid any longer now. Hm…

Update #3: Parallels somehow still totally disrupts my workflow. I’ve just booted a Windows Vista VM (pure pain, yes) and Parallels Desktop 5 Mac immediately started to ask me to install its tools. I clicked later and right after the dialog disappeared a new one popped up, that told me something about the VM/Mac profile-synchronization. I clicked on the red X, since I just wanted to test something quick within Vista. Regardless of my intend to dismiss the procedure, Parallels logged me out of my Windows Vista session, so I had to log in again. Again, the profile-sync dialog appeared – I didn’t touch it anymore. Some seconds later a new dialog appeared, that was telling me that Parallels placed some Windows folder right within my Dock – and I was like “WTF?!”. Ouff…

I’ve never actually been a fan of jail-breaking the iPhone nor the iPod, since it’s totally controversial. Most people who jail-break their devices think “Why should I just use 10% of what I could really use on that device?!“, though they don’t think twice: Why did they buy an Apple product like the iPhone or the iPod Touch? There are three kind of people who buy these things: The first type are the “cool” people. They like to pay the “Cool Tax” just to be cool themselves and impress other people. “Look how cool my new iPhone is!!!111“. Such people might jail-break, just because they’d like to be able to say “Oh well, sure, you got an iPhone, too, but look what mine has, that yours doesn’t!!!111“.

The second kind of people, jail-break their iDevices because they can. That’s it. Nothing more. These people are usually some people with more interest into technology, which just have fun doing such things. “Look, my iPhone runs an SSH session! And look, on my Xbox I have a media-center that looks just like Apple TV but has way more features. For free! And oh, my PSP runs Linux!!“. Those people in general do stuff like this because they enjoy it and don’t really much care of the device’s functionality. They don’t care if they won’t be able to play any games on their PSP anymore, they don’t care if they lose their rest-warranty on their Xbox and they don’t care if they won’t be able to read any e-mails on their iPhones anymore. They just don’t care, if it works properly (without hacking) or not.

What brings me to the third kind of people. Those buy products like the ones from Apple mainly because of one important reason: It simply works! You turn it on, you do what you need to do and then you turn it off. No hacking, no installing, no complex configuration, nothing. It just works.

However, the knowledge regarding IT/computers/devices of those people vary from none to I-could-write-my-own-OS. Those, who really know what they’re doing won’t jail-break their devices or if they will, they’re being kind-number-two. Those who don’t really know but hear from all kind of people (kind-number-one mostly) what cool things would be possible if they’d jail-break their devices, will also jail-break their devices one way or the other. And here the controversiality begins.

Why would someone want to spend the amount of $X on a device that’s totally managed, works exactly as it should and gives you only a number features, which therefor really work and then take highly experimental and nearly unsupported software, put it on exactly this device and try to do things with it that were never be planned to be done with that device.

Those people then realize, how crappy everything started to be, though their devices has an enhanced set of features now. They’re going to be yelling about everything that goes wrong and isn’t working out in a way you’d expect it from an Apple product – but they forget, that it’s not an Apple product anymore. At least not the software. Not all of it.

However, the same thing happens to people of kind-number-one, though the difference is, that those would never complain about their crappy set of new features in public.

Anyway, so as I said, I’m just restoring from the jail-break to Apple’s original. Not that I’m complaining or just tried to be “cool” – I was really interested on two things: First, if I manage it to jail-break it through a Windows XP VM and second, how the jail-breaking stuff evolved till now. I was really curious about the software available for the hacked firmware and the things you could do with it.

Unfortunately it’s still exactly as I thought: It’s nice to play around with, but it’s nothing for a productive, everyday use. The software is too unstable, too untested and totally hacked-together. The programmers didn’t follow any design- or usability-guidelines and in general everything looks too unstable. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that the people who’ve realized this did crap! I admire any hacker who’s contributing to this project. But that’s the exact point of it: Those are usually hackers/developers/freaks who don’t really care about usability-guidelines or stuff like that. Just like those people that were developing UIs for Linux once (and still are).

However, besides this, I didn’t really benefit of the jail-break. I used a cool theme, though my whole iPod got awfully slow because of that. As it seems, the original theme won’t be replaced by a new one, but instead it will be just “overlaid”. At least this was my impression when opening the Preferences, seeing the iPod’s standard theme, waiting some seconds for the iPod to become responsive again and then seeing the modified theme. And this of course also impacted on my battery life: By just listening to music I usually got 3 days of battery-life – and I listen a lot to music! With the jail-break installed, after one day I usually only had twenty-five percent of the battery-life left.

Eh, well. I played a bit around, I’ve seen the jail-break myself and I’ve also seen that it’s far from being called “oh this could really make me use it!“, at least by me. Oh, I guess my recovery has finished….

WebKit Development Tools

In the past few weeks, I was involved into heavy JavaScript web-development at work and had to work with tools that allow me to debug dynamic web-content in an effortless way. Most people would now say “Use Firefox with FireBug addition!” and I would even agree with them, if I would be using some Windows operating-system instead of my lovely Mac. Everyone who has ever used Firefox on a Linux or a Mac OS X will know, that it’s a pain in the arse. Due to the way Mozilla-developers have taken to make Firefox available on multiple platforms, it lacks of any speed and integration within most implementations.

So what to do on a Mac, where Firefox trying to render a full-blown AJAX-site needs more space and CPU-power than a VMware or Parallels instance of Windows XP, running the IE? Most people don’t really know, that the Mac’s integrated browser already provides a very good toolset for web-development which just got even better with the version 4 (yet, still Beta) of Safari.

The toolset is hidden, on a regular OS X, but it can be unlocked pretty easy. The only thing you gotta do, is quit your Safari, open a Terminal and enter this command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true


It should quit without any output. After that, you can quit the Terminal and re-start Safari. You might not see any difference to Safari’s appearance before spawning the command, but now just try to do a right-click / command-click within a web-site. You will see, that your popup-menu has just been extended by one new item at its bottom, called “Inspect Element“. By clicking this entrie, Safari either opens a new window or separates your current one with an additional view, depending on what Safari version you’re using. This command works on 3 and 4.

Within that window, you will see a lot of useful information about the page. You can see time and size measurements, script-warnings and -errors and many many more. This extensions to Safari’s WebKit provides you nearly everything you might know from FireFox Add-Ons like FireBug. And besides of that, it allows you to profile your page in a sleek and easy, graphical way.

I’m now working quite some time with those tools, exactly because of all the problems I had with Firefox on my Mac, and I must say that I love them. I love the integration and the way it allows me to debug my sites. The only thing I liked more in FireBug was the precision of its GET/POST/PUT/…-output, but most of the time I don’t need that anyway.

Enjoy!

The GNOME Shell redefines user interactions with the GNOME desktop. In particular, it offers new paradigms for launching applications, accessing documents, and organizing open windows in GNOME. Later, it will introduce a new applets eco-system and offer new solutions for other desktop features, such as notifications and contacts management. The GNOME Shell is intended to replace functions handled by the GNOME Panel and by the window manager in previous versions of GNOME. The GNOME Shell has rich visual effects enabled by new graphical technologies.

So, the GNOME Shell is actually a more lickable and not-so-crappy version of what we can remember from old Windows 98/2k times, usually called something like Talisman Desktop or similar. Those applications were replacements for the actual explorer.exe binary, which hooked into the system logon and tried to build a better looking and feeling, theme-able interface for the end-user. Though, these applications never really found a market niche, last but not least because of the mostly exorbitant pricing policy. A few time later these add-ons were pushed away by Windows XP’s own theming abilities.

However, as it seems the GNOME community now starting writing a similar add-on for the GNOME desktop, using features provided by modern soft- and especially hardware. The whole Shell is hardware accelerated and seems to be working pretty fluent – not only because it’s exceptionally not written in Python or any other sick scripting language. Instead, it makes use of native C code, combined with Clutter and hooks for JavaScript plug-ins.

From what I’ve seen so far, it’s not that bad and finally seems to really be an add-on that integrates into the desktop, instead of being just another application which I need to bound somehow into my GNOME desktop. My colleague just quickly compiled and ran it and at least on his nVidia accelerated hardware it worked out pretty smooth and at least while testing it didn’t crash once.

It could become a pretty cool and promising project, if the people running it will find somebody concerned about UI-Design/-Usability and maybe some graphical artists, too and maybe make it look more “stable”. At the moment, the whole ‘shell’ still looks pretty half-cooked, but of course, they’re just at their beginning. So let’s wait and see – or better even contribute and change!

The first thing I’ve noticed already within the installation was, that it doesn’t differ pretty much from today’s Vista regarding to the look and feel. The installation was pretty similar, as good as nothing needed to configure and the after-setup-configuration was as usual: Nearly 100% automated. The only hard question was the one asking for the current network-location (Home, Office, Public – muh).

Windows 7 RC

After the installation, a shiny Vista-ish desktop with a little fish as wallpaper welcomes you and some seconds later the bubble-floods already start again. Not as heavy as with Windows XP, but still he was announcing something regarding new updates and multimedia devices that have been found. It was less disturbing than on XP, but still it could have been solved a better way – in my opinion.

The first good impression I got was the speed. The RC of Windows 7 is faster than Scarlet Speedster, compared to Vista and maybe even Windows XP. I don’t know sure, I did not run benchmarks or stuff like that. I’m talking about the feeling I got after clicking half an hour around the whole desktop.

Windows 7 RC

Since I’ve configured the VM to be a Windows Vista in Fusion, I could even run and install the VMware Tools CD to get better (and of course faster) graphics. I did not test whether 3D-acceleration works out with Windows 7 under Fusion, yet, but I know that I’ve tried to start the Windows Movie DVD Something Maker and got an error mentioning something about my graphics hardware being not okay. However, I’m going to check whether and if yes, how fast the 3D-Acceleration works. Under my Windows XP VM I managed it to play Max Payne, heh.

I didn’t have much time to really work with the new Redmond system so that I can’t tell yet, whether I would consider a change from XP to 7 or not (no, I have no hardware running Windows, only VMs) – especially since I hadn’t have the possibility to check the compatibility features with Windows XP-and-maybe-earlier applications. The first impression is though pretty positive, I did not expect to get such an fluently working and smooth looking operating system from the folks at Microsoft. They really seem to have understood at least some mistakes they did with Vista and are now trying to correct them (or at least make them less painful).

I’m really excited about the Windows 7 release and I’m definitely going to take a look at that. We’ll see…

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.

Maxdome Requirements

So, since I have my “new” internet-connection/-contract for some months now already, I just thought to try out the service it comes with, named “Maxdome”. This seems to be some kind of portal for watching television shows and even movies online – with some pay-per-view concept. My contract however includes some free shows and movies within this service, which I wanted to taste.

The first thing I did was to run the hardware-check provided on the service’s site. This actually resulted as display in the picture on the left. I was a little bit confused when I read the “Windows 98″ requirement listed within the hardware-requirements – but eh. So this test told me, my Mac was not compatible with their service – unfortunately it didn’t tell me the exact reason why.

So I just tried to watch a show. I clicked it and… well. I got the reason that made it impossible for me to watch the stuff provided by Maxdome. As it seems, there’s a need of some Windows Media Player Internet Explorer plugin, which actually makes it possible to play the DRM-content provided by Maxdome. Within the FAQs there even was the question about watching Maxdome’s content on a Linux or a Mac. The simple answer by Maxdome was: Nope, it’s not possible, unless you find a way to get an IE with the needed plugin running – e.g. using a virtualized Windows.

This is really great! So let’s just calculate a bit: A Windows XP Home installation CD + valid license costs nowadays around €80, plus maybe three or four € delivery/transport. A VMware Fusion license costs another €80, fortunately there are no shipping costs. In total, we end up with €164. After spending that money, plus around two hours for the installation and configuration of the VM/VM-Guest we can (maybe) finally play the content provided by Maxdome. Hurray.

Now, assuming that our local video rental store charges us €3 per day for a show/movie DVD (what would be pretty much, by the way), then we could take the money we spent on the VMware and the Windows XP license and borrow around 54 DVDs. If we now also assume, that we just found time to watch movies on saturdays or sundays (where we would pay €3 from saturday to monday!), we could watch movies for 54 weeks – what means that we would watch every weekend a movie, for one year and two weeks. And after that year, Maxdome starts to get interesting, because of the prices that would be half of the ones for a real DVD – but of course there would be no such quality as on a DVD either.

However, I hope you got my ironic way of getting this off my chest. I’m really pissed, and for sure I’m going to call my ISP and ask for quitting this service together with a price reduction at my contract – if that’s possible.

Trust WB-1200p Setup

Well… sure. Of course. I know.

What else happened. Well, I solved the problem I described some days ago, regarding the Windows XP Sysprep stuff. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out the way I actually planned it:

The scheduled task seemed not to be ran, because (at least this is what I guess) Sysprep changes the system’s/system-user’s SIDs within the Mini-Setup. So when a scheduled task is being added to the scheduler while running the Sysprep procedure, it adds the task using the Administrator’s current SID – which won’t be the same after the reboot. Because of that, the scheduler then reports the miss of the actual user, under which this task should be ran.

However, I’ve solved it by adding the AutoLogon=Yes and the AutoLogonCount=1 parameters to the sysprep.inf. The first one generally activates the AutoLogon feature, so that the Administrator will be automatically logged on after system boot and the second option defines, how many times the Administrator should be automatically logged in after boot. By setting it to 1 the Administrator will be automatically logged on only after the machine’s first boot – on the following boots no more AutoLogon will be used.

Then, I added a RunOnce key into the system’s registry (within the mini-setup, using the “reg” command), which executes a batch-script. Within this batch script then I was able to do everything I want – unlock the firewall’s port, enable RDP and add the Domain-Group to the RDP-Users. Yay.

It’s quite an ugly hack, but at least it does the job. And it’s the only method I found out to work.

What other things occurred this week… hm… ah yeah. My car. It smells. No, not a joke. Let me go into greater detail: Last Thursday, I went to the gas station and filled up my car with gasoline. The day after, I drove to work and left it there on the parking space, since I had a company car for the weekend. When I returned on monday and sat into my CRX, intending to drive home, the whole car smelled extremely of gasoline. I thought, that it might be, because I left it fully refueled there over the weekend, so I just drove off. The smell didn’t disappear when I reached my home, so I left the sunroof open. When I entered the car again later that evening, it still smelled. The next day I brought it to the garage and had it checked. On Wednesday morning I went there to pick it up, and they told me that nothing could be found: No leaking tube, no holes, nothing. They couldn’t even tell me if this is actually dangerous.

Now I kept the car driving until today, because I wanted to see whether the strength of smell decreases proportional to the fuel-amount in my tank – and of course it does. Unfortunately it only decreases, but does not completely disappear. So now I’m thinking of brining my car in to the official Honda garage hear here and let it checked up again there. Maybe they could tell me more, since they use to have more experience with these kind of cars.

It’s not only that I don’t know how dangerous this situation actually is, but besides it’s really annoying since the smell uses to makes me pretty dizzy after a while – what’s kinda disadvantageous while driving. So I definitely need to get this fixed until my car burns out – either because of some leakage or because I drove it into a tree, due to the dizziness. Hmpf.

And now I guess I should finally go to bed. I’m still a bit sick and I didn’t sleep that much the past few days. Good night everybody.

Therefor, today I’m a bit squashed and wondering what to do on this sunday. I guess I’ll stay in and try to figure out, why I can’t install Exchange 2008 on my Windows 2008 Server. I would really like to set it up and test ActiveSync using the iPod Touch I ordered – assuming it’ll arrive someday. I’m really wondering what the fsck is going on there, I’m now waiting for over one month for my touchy-touchy-fluffy-toy… hm.

The first two things weren’t that hard to realize. Sysprep actually runs every command contained in the Cmdlines.txt in \%sysprep%\i386\$oem$\ directory. Enabling RDP is possible using a simple reg-commandline which changes the value of the fDenyTSConnection key. Also opening the firewall’s port is trivial by using the netsh command. There seems to be some way by using a winnt.sif-file containing some parameters that should modify the firewall setup, unfortunately I didn’t manage to get that working in an reasonable amount of time. So I’ve just used the mentioned command to open the port in the firewall, for all profiles. The profile-argument is important, for me it did not work out without setting it to ALL.

Anyhow, the third ToDo was (and still is) tricky. The problem when using the net localgroup command to add the group to the local Remotedesktopusers-group is the following: While the mini-setup is running, the computer hasn’t got its future hostname and because of that it’s not yet joined to the domain. When trying to execute the net command for adding the domain-group to the local group it will of course fail. I searched for many different ways to do that, but each method I’ve found didn’t really work out for me:

autoexec.bat: Hacking the command to the autoexec.bat, so that it gets executed on the next reboot would be a way, unfortunately this file is ignore by every not-DOS-based Windows, like Windows XP is, for example.

win.ini: I’m not sure exactly why this didn’t work out, because the documentation says, that the Run-parameters configured in that INI will be run on Windows’ startup. In my case, the net command hasn’t seemed to be run. I think that the win.ini commands get executed before the connection to the domain has been established, so that the actual net command would have been run, but unsuccessful.

Run/RunOnce/RunService/RunServiceOnce-Keys: Would work out pretty good, if some user would log in. In my case, no user will log in until RDP is available to the specific domain-group.

And so on. I got pretty desperate, until I got an idea: A scheduled task! Windows supports adding scheduled tasks even from the commandline by using the schtasks command. I tried out the /sc onboot parameter, but unfortunately it seems to be working just like the win.ini, what cause the group not to be added. Then, I wrote myself a batch-script, which executes the net command for adding the domain-group, checks the command’s error code and if successful removes the scheduled task. The task itself I created using /sc minute /mo 1. By that, the task will be run every minute after the task-scheduler gets started on Windows’ boot and try to add the group. The whole schtasks /create thing works and even my script runs when I doubleclick it, but somehow the scheduler can’t run the script I passed to him while the mini-setup was running. I tried to same /create command within Windows XP and it worked out – my batch file got executed after one minute, added the group, saw that there was no error adding the group and removed the schtasks job.

Now I’m trying to understand, why the job does not work when I create it within the mini-setup. It’s really annoying, because Windows really does not provide any information below the basic output. There is no way (or at least none I would know of) to see what the schtasks daemon actually does when trying to run the script and fails. There is no strace. Nothing. Argh.

It really rankles me that the last piece doesn’t work the way it actually should, because the other implementations run pretty smooth and lasting. *beckon to Thomas*

Hmpf…

UPDATE: I just talked to gicmo, since he has Parallels installed on his Mac, and asked him to give me the ouput of ps aux | grep -i parall, so that I can compare it to my ps aux | grep -i vm (yepp, I’ve just installed the Fusion Demo) output… and well.. I guess I can call it equal. Each of these two products has some daemons running in background, even if the application itself isn’t or even hasn’t been running since the Mac started up. For me, both of them solve the actual problem I have: Virtualizing other operating systems (Linux, Win, UNIX, etc.) on my Mac. Now I need to figure out, what the details are, that make one product look better than the other. I guess I’ll need to search for some comparison of “Parallels vs. VMware Fusion“, using the recent versions of both. Maybe I’ll find something.

Fscking Redmond-Software.

So I thought, let’s upgrade to 3.0.3. And so I did. Well… same thing happend. After searching for a solution for around two minutes I completely deleted this bunch of crap and installed Apple’s Safari. Which works. Without touching anything. Nothing. Not even one thing.

However, I think I really got sick of all that stuff that doesn’t just work, at least at home.

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.

Windows: Your car’s brochure is promising you the sky on earth – unfortunatelly the actual car you got it more like hell. The engine starts up pretty quick, but after a while it dies for no reason. Besides, when opeining the driver’s window, the radio recpetion gets worse and the engine’s temperature indicator starts rotating. Luckily you have support for your car for at least ten years, so you can bring it in everytime you want and get a new engine management firmware. Until the one called “Service Pack 3″ everything worked out pretty good, but now your car started behaving _very_ curious.

Solaris: That is no car. It’s a truck. Made of parts produced in the late 80′s. And remember to never, ever pull the handbrake – it doesn’t do what a regular handbrake would do in a regular truck!

Mac: Your car is so shiny and glossy that you could just lick it the whole day. Everything is clean and tidy. After taking place in the driverseat you start your engine and go for a testdrive. The car runs smooth and nice. Unfortunatelly, you cannot pop the hood because your carriage is contained of one big, chubby piece. If your battery dies, you would just need to bring the car in and Apple would take care of it, in return of a small donation. Besides, when finished reading this text your car is already deprecated, since Apple just released a new one, called “3G”, which now also contains a spectacular new and fancy feature named “The Rev Counter”.

Minix: It’s the DMC DeLorean. Actually it’s pretty cool, but nobody really cares a crap about it.

QNX: This car is a full-blown real-time, high-speed power-vehicle. No regular driver would ever buy this car for daily use, but every well versed person knows what potential this car brings with it. These kind of cars are commonly used at airports and other places where lifetime and high-available is an argument.

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.

Besides these problems, the pricing on the VDSL25 package is still pretty high (~60 bucks per month) and I’m sure that as soon as the “hype” disappears, T-Home will slash their prices. So I think I might just wait a little bit more until I’ll get myself such a T-Home Entertain package.

By the way: I found it funny to see some Windows running on the T-Home Receiver, heh. Maybe this thing will work out soon with Apple TV. And maybe, when the IPTV technology becomes deprecated, there will also be an OpenSource project that will support it… more or less.

Altogether the whole system runs pretty smooth, unfortunatelly it doesn’t seem to be designed for mobile use, since it doesn’t just not implement “Locations” – it actually breaks the whole concept and does the exact opposite. It’s a bummer, because the first impression when seing openSuSE makes you think of it as a pretty cool enterprise system with stable software that just works. I don’t know yet whether I will keep openSuSE or move along to something else… or maybe I will just recover the DD-image of my broken Debian SID and hope for some upgrades that might fix the problems the last ones caused. And if that works I would probably never ever upgrade again, unless I’d have a whole copy of the running system which I could just play back if the upgrade procedure fails again.

By the way, at work I had dialogue with a colleague which blamed SID for the failure on upgrading. But like I wrote yesterday I also told him, that on an unstable distribution with latest software I do not expect the software to work 100% – my Epiphany kept constantly crashing since one of the last upgrades on SID, but it didn’t bother me too much, because I accept the fact that latest software also brings problems with it. My system got screwed because of the upgrade-procedure itself, and this is what I just can’t stand. I’m expecting even the unstablest system to provide an upgrade-procedure which does not break a running system by configuring the packages wrong and cause wrong permissions on files like /dev/null. Not even on Windows I ever experienced that the upgrade-procedure broke the system – it was always the things included in the service packs, heh.

However, to cut a long story short, I just informed myself about the pricings on the latest Apple hardware. Besides I’m really planning to get an iPhone + T-Mobile contract for around fifty bucks per month. It’s pretty expensive, but I think it’s worth. At least, it seems to work. Unlike OpenMoko, heh.

Great job, Apple! And by the way: Why does this Updater wants to install Safari, if the only software I’ve installed on that Windows is an iTunes?