How to have a workstation in the net where people can work together on standard programs ?
There are two aspects on this question: public access, and safe sandbox.
Public Access
By using VNC a distant computer screen may be watched, independent of the sofware which is running.
Using a distributor many people are able to watch it.
Safe Sandbox
How to expose a computer to the public while preventing missuse ?
The solution seems to use a virtual machine with a trusted state.
QEMU seems to be a nice choice for this job, having already a build in VNC-Server.
QEMU is in the debian / ubuntu distribution, so installing it is quite easy:
sudo apt-get install qemu
unfortunately this is version 0.7, missing the VNC-server
so compiling it from the sources …
use cases
There are several contexts where I might want to “share” a public workstation. Each context probably needs a slightly different solution.
- I want everyone on some IRC forum to “all be on the same page”, viewing the same web page at the same time, “live”.
- … and I want a one-way broadcast, so everyone can see what I’m doing, but I’m the only one who can type stuff in, click links, etc. – all others can do is make suggestions on IRC. – perhaps just “sharing one window”, the web browser window.
- … and I want a two-way communication, where anyone on the IRC forum can click links, type in a new URL, etc. – but I somehow want to limit their actions to the browser, I don’t want them deleting anything on my hard drive, installing adware, etc.
- “recording session”, where I record how I do something, and then later have a one-way broadcast to show others how I did it.
- I want to share my computer with one trusted friend, so he can poke around in the hard drive, figure out what the problem is, and install whatever updates and new software he thinks I might need. – here, VNC is the solution.
- I’m working on a web page, and I want to make it looks OK to my users – but they use a variety of web browsers on a variety of operating systems that run on hardware that I don’t have – “cross platform browser testing”.
- I want to pair program with some other programmer in some other state, and I want to sandbox the executable so that even though the code is riddled with bugs (that’s what we’re trying to fix), it can’t possibly wipe the hard drive of my local machine or my fellow programmer’s machine. I’m guessing VNC is the solution here, also.
- … some other use case?
Sharing one window
Should go to another page. Which ? Move to LowTechSharedWebBrowser, perhaps?
How to share a single window on your own computer with the web ?
saw a plugin for firefox somewhere … but unfortunately only for win32 and osx
Is “sharing one window” the same thing as what Wikipedia:comparison_of_remote_desktop_software calls “Seamless Window” ?
recording sessions
Creating training movies with VNC2SWF http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/270
cross platform browser testing
links
Discussion
- Work by observation alone.
- People just watch.
- It’s secure, because people can’t do anything.
- Share desktops during IRC sessions.
- eliminates questions:
- “Are you looking at the URL I just told you about?”
- “Which part are you looking at?”
- eliminates the need for IRC, actually
- since you can (theoretically) just type at each other from windows.
- questions:
- can our network connections handle it?
- can our visualization systems handle it?
- that is, can we productively view 6 desktops at the same time?
- no; not by any VNC technology I’ve seen
http://www.vncscan.com/ claims to be a solution, untested.
for the bandwith problems: use a vnc-reflector on a wide-bandwith machine
for the viz-system: use tabbed vnc viewer
an easy “just looking” approach would then be:
- have a local SharedScreen? by vnc (todo: investigate which vnc-servers allow sharing one window only)
- do a port-forward by ssh to a vnc-reflector
- publish vnc-reflectors adress
one should set up a system where to organize pwds and ports for these sharing-sessions
can we productively view 6 desktops at the same time?
While I have not yet tried this out, my understanding is that most VNC servers allows a Java-enabled web browser to view the desktop. So you could flip between 6 different desktops using the tabs in a tabbed browser. Or arrange 6 different browser windows and arrange them so you see a little bit of all 6 desktops simultaneously.
I have no idea if that would be “productive” or not.
See also: LowTechSharedWebBrowser