
Apache Guacamole - dalacv
http://guacamole.incubator.apache.org
======
vxxzy
I've been using Guacamole for 3+ years over many different releases. Support
about 20+ users at any given time. It is a "Win" in my book. RDP Performance
is decent for regular use. We make extensive use of VNC with it. We spawn
Virtual VNC/X Instances with Xvnc4 and serve Windows Apps Running in WINE,
within the Virtual X Display. It's a great way to "Webify" older enterprise
apps so long as you are willing to support it. Thanks to Guac's extensibility,
We even have our own print daemon that pushes PDFs to the end user while in
VNC sessions.

~~~
Macuyiko
Agreed. Recently set up a 100 user experiment on a beefy server in our
research department were I used Guacamole (with RDP) to handle the
problem/assumption of participants only having a web-browser. Worked
fantastically!

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theophrastus
12,000 years ago when 10BaseT still roamed the earth we had things called
X-terminals. All the X-terminal had to do was to run an X server, while all
computing was done on the large (for the time, typically DEC or IBM) computers
some-where else. When X-terminals were packed up and sold by the pallet load
we saw having "our own CPU" on our desks as a great liberation. So here's my
gormless question: What has changed that fully distributed systems aren't as
desirable?

~~~
nlawalker
>> What has changed that fully distributed systems aren't as desirable?

The amount of stored personal data (content, installed software,
preferences/configuration) that the average user wants to access, and the
concerns (expense, privacy, resiliency, speed) related to distributing that
data.

The average user of today doesn't want more CPU, they want their _stuff_. For
most people, it's far more efficient to open a window to the remote machine
that has their stuff than it is to try to move all that stuff onto the machine
they're sitting at.

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technologia
I absolutely <3 guacamole. Its definitely part of every workspace I provision,
its easy to use and plus you get control of everything. I'm glad its an ASF
project now, it'll probably get even more visibility than it had before.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
> I'm glad its an ASF project now

This is why incubating projects should use (Incubating) everywhere and clearly
announce their status to avoid confusion. It isn't part of the ASF yet and,
while unlikely, the incubation could not work out for any number of reasons.
The usual suspects of successful incubations are mentoring them, though, so
this will largely amount to very time-sensitive pedantry on my part.

(I was very confused and missed the footer on mobile the first time I read the
page. I thought some new project I hadn't heard of had incubated oddly
quickly.)

~~~
technologia
I mistyped as well, I meant to say incubating as well.

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nickpsecurity
This is an interesting project. I'm glad they built this as we're undoubtedly
going to see situations where people absolutely won't use a regular client but
have a HTML5 browser they will use. This will serve that niche. Might also
help us privacy-aware geeks get them off services that sell them out by
facilitating easy hookup to their own desktop and data. Not sure how well it
will do that but there's potential. Being Apache project is good thing as
usual. :)

EDIT: Given JS vs HTML/CSS discussion elsewhere, I should also give credit to
Apache site engineers for using tech that loads instantly and visually
pleasing despite NoScript. Loads pretty fast on mobile, too. Good counter-
example to bloat of modern Web.

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xahrepap
If anyone wants to quickly test this out, I made a docker-compose file that
uses the official images.

[https://github.com/JoelJ/docker-compose-
guacamole/](https://github.com/JoelJ/docker-compose-guacamole/)

~~~
koffiezet
Nice! That makes it a lot easier to try it out quickly! Will look into it :)

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dsr_
When is this preferable to using a VPN or SSH tunnel to carry VNC/RDP/Spice to
a local native client?

It seems to me that either you have the ability to install such a client, XOR
you don't trust the local machine enough to want to use it.

~~~
brimstedt
Probably when you want to use the browser (from computers you do not control)
or when the user is not that computer literate.

~~~
newjersey
Between this and Google Play apps (seems unlikely but I still hope we will
have the ability to side load APK) on ChromeOS, we can bring the likes of
Citrix to the home -- a permanently Internet-connected headless computer at
home and connecting to it from your Chromebook.

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gshulegaard
If Mike Jumper is on this thread, Congratulations!

I worked at a small company that leveraged Guacamole to provide access via the
web to a legacy Windows desktop application and working with the Guac team
(including direct support from Mike) was a pleasure.

Also, it works well and the bits I saw were well architected. For reference, I
replaced their web client with my own AngularJS wrapper at the direction of
management and it was pretty easy (with some help from Mike because I was
not...still am not...an amazing JavaScript guru).

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aftbit
Is there a good Linux equivalent to Window's terminal services? Ideally I'd be
able to migrate my X session from physical display/keyboard hardware to VNC
then back to physical hardware when I log out. I'd also settle for just being
able to easily manage a number of sessions over VNC (with decent
authentication).

~~~
rcarmo
There have been a number of attempts. The closest is
[http://www.xrdp.org](http://www.xrdp.org)
([https://github.com/neutrinolabs/xrdp](https://github.com/neutrinolabs/xrdp)),
which does basic session management against a backing Xrdp or Xvnc server,
proxying either to RDP.

I haven't used it in a while (~6m), but to get the most of it you really had
to compile from source and understand how to manage the various daemons
(xrdp.ini is a mess, and configuring some things was rather counter-
intuitive). Otherwise you wouldn't have resizable desktops (as in xrandr, not
rescaling) and other niceties.

Not sure about audio, now that I think about it, but the gist of things is
that so far no mainstream distribution got xrdp right or usable out of the box
(unless we're talking about the niche LTSP-related stuff).

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ausjke
First time heard about this project, thanks to HN. I use both Teamviewer and
VNC, how does this compare to them? Especially Teamviewer that is.

------
dankohn1
I'd love to see this packaged up in Homebrew to have an alternative to Back to
My Mac that only requires a web browser as a client.

What Dynamic DNS solutions are most popular?

~~~
jasonjei
I think there's already a docker image that has this packaged up. That might
be a lot easier than trying to patch it up for OS X? [0]

[0]
[http://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/doc/0.9.9/gug/guacamol...](http://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/doc/0.9.9/gug/guacamole-
docker.html)

~~~
jasonjei
Don't know why I suddenly got downvoted after this comment was voted up?

The Docker image is officially supported by the project, and Docker is easy to
install on a Mac, and it's turnkey on AWS, Google, Heroku...

From Guacamole's docs: ``Guacamole can be deployed using Docker, removing the
need to build guacamole-server from source or configure the web application
manually. The Guacamole project provides officially-supported Docker images
for both Guacamole and guacd which are kept up-to-date with each release.''

[https://hub.docker.com/r/glyptodon/guacamole/](https://hub.docker.com/r/glyptodon/guacamole/)

Getting it on a Mac requires installing a slew of dependencies and two daemons
(one of which is a Java servlet container). Docker containers almost make it
too easy with not too much overhead. To get it working on a Mac, you'd need to
install a JVM and tomcat on top of the guacd daemon.

Alright, I'll shut up now. Thought I was being helpful by providing a solution
now, but I guess what you wanted to hear was let's hope for a turnkey solution
on OS X Homebrew rather than use a Docker image straight from the horse's
mouth.

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znpy
My guess is that this project is very poorly advertised...

A couple of months ago I was playing with remote desktops and did not find
this marvel.

I ended up playing with X2Go, which is nice BTW.

I am wondering... Assuming I have a Linux remote desktop, can I disconnect and
reconnect after a while BUT leave all of my applications running? I mean,
without logging out.

~~~
mongoosled
Check out tmux. It's great at doing that for terminal apps.
[https://tmux.github.io/](https://tmux.github.io/)

~~~
znpy
I know about tmux (and gnu screen), but i was thinking of something like
pause/resume.

Once upon a time i read that in the eighties at Sun Microsystems they had a
big fat thin-client based architecture with dumb thin clients that only had
vga port, keyboard, mouse and a smart-card reader.

The nice thing about such architecture was that once your smart-card was
pulled out, the screen blanked and your remote session was closed.

But your desktop session was still running, on the server!

The coolest thing about this was that basically you could pick any desk in the
building and just sit there and work.

Or you could go to one of your colleagues' desk, pull out his/her smartcard,
insert your one in, and show him/her what you've been working on, ask for
help, collaborate or anything.

This has always fascinated me.

I was wondering if I could use guacamole to do something similar: leave my
desktop running in a datacenter somewhere in the world and use whatever to
just connect to it and "resume" working.

~~~
verbify
But that's exactly what tmux does. Are you familiar with tmux attach and tmux
detach? (Some people only use tmux for split screens and to keep the session
from dying).

------
sinatra
Guacamole is amazing! Maybe this is a good place to ask this question: Is
there a way to make RDP work for two simultaneous users? Currently, as soon as
the second RDP connection is made, the first one is logged out. So, we're
forced to use VNC instead.

~~~
detaro
Official Microsoft answer: buy a server version of Windows

Unofficially there are a few hacks that either patch the terminal service or
replace it with a wrapper that tricks it. Not sure if I would trust stuff like
that for important systems. (e.g.
[https://github.com/stascorp/rdpwrap](https://github.com/stascorp/rdpwrap))

------
bryogenic
anyone have hands on experience with this and noVNC? Clear winners on either
side?

~~~
binwiederhier
I have been using an old version of Guacamole for quite some time, and it
works very well. I don't like that it is so heavy (Tomcat, ..) and the setup
and user management is rather complicated. Maybe that has changed lately, I
sure hope so, because once it's set up, it works beautifully.

noVNC is much lighter, but it seems very limited.

~~~
vxxzy
Guacamole has support for LDAP Auth.

------
noinsight
When did it become an Apache project? It used to be its own thing.

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Scarbutt
What is an alternative to RDP for linux? VNC has always be slow and cluncky
for compared to RDP.

~~~
noinsight
TigerVNC actually works well, I started using it over WAN recently and it's
very smooth. Traditionally VNC has sucked. But it's still not as good as RDP
in some ways.

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tek-cyb-org
So can I install this on a windows computer that I manage? For example, to
replace teamviewer?

~~~
vxxzy
If you have the right version of Windows, you can enabled RDP access. You can
then use Guacamole to connect to the Windows Computer.

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laveur
I have to admit this is pretty awesome! I am going to have to suggest this to
our platform team at work as a way to allow others to access our build
servers. Hopefully this can be configured with strict access controls.

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snorrah
Ah if I recall, Red Hat use this for their training environments. Haven't
actually tried using it though, as they also support ssh access and I went
with that.

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benbenolson
Bravo! Seems very well done, and seems to work rather well.

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pstuart
It would be great to get ATEN KVM support in there too.

~~~
tbyehl
Oooooh, what I'd give for something that could be a transparent Java-free
gateway to all those IPMI / stand-alone KVM interfaces...

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edoceo
I love this project, even made an auth-plugin for it. Bye bye RDP and VNC!
(for end-user cases at least)

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conqrr
Time to ditch Teamviewer.

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throwaway0209
This is the coolest thing I've seen all morning!

