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PublicSharedWorkstation

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.

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

Define external redirect: SharedScreen

EditNearLinks: MeatballWiki WikiMatrix PatrickAnderson

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