Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Allow work from home?

[J. Roeleveld]

On Monday, January 18, 2016 02:02:27 AM lee wrote:
> "J. Roeleveld" <joost@××××××××.org> writes:
> > On 17 January 2016 18:35:20 CET, Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com> wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> >>I use the icaclient provided by Citrix to access my virtual desktop at
> >>work,
> >>but have never tried to set up something similar at home.  What
> >>opensource
> >>software would I need for this?  Is there a wiki somewhere to follow?
> >>
> > I'd love to do this myself as well.
> >
> > Citrix sells the full package as 'XenDesktop'. To do it yourself you need
> > a VMserver (Xen or similar) and a remote desktop tool that hooks into the
> > VM display. (Spice or VNC)
> >
> > Then you need some way of authenticating users and providing access to the
> > client software. [...]
>
> You would have a full VM for each user?

Yes

> That would be a huge waste of resources,

Diskspace and CPU can easily be overcommitted.

> plus having to take care of a lot of VMs,

Automated.

> plus having to buy  a lot of Windoze licenses

Volume licensing takes care of that.

> and taking about a week to install the updates
> after installing a VM.

Never heard of VM templates?

> Add to that that the xen host goes down at
> random time intervals (because the sending queue of the network card
> times out for reasons that cannot be determined) which can be as long as
> a day, a week or even up to three weeks, and you are likely to become a
> rather unhappy administrator.

Sorry, but I consider that a bug in your hardware. If it's really that 
unstable, replace it.
I've been running Xen enabled servers for nearly 15 years. Never had issues 
like that. If it were truly that unstable, it wouldn't be gaining popularity.

> Try kvm instead, and you'll find that
> it's impossible to migrate the VMs from xen to to kvm when you want to
> use virtio drivers because you can't install them on an existing Windoze
> VM.

Not a problem with the virtualisation technology. It is an issue with driver 
management inside MS Windows.
There are ways to migrate VMs succesfully, I just don't see the point in 
wasting time for that.

The biggest reason why I don't use KVM is the lack of full snapshot 
functionality. Snapshotting disks is nice, but you end up with an unclean-
shutdown situation and anything that's not yet committed to disk is gone.

> Then there's the question how well vnc or spice connections work over a
> VPN that goes over the internet.

VNC works quite well, as long as you use a minimal desktop. (like blackbox).
Don't expect KDE or Gnome to be usable.
I haven't tried Spice yet, but I've read that it performs better.

> It's not like the employees could get
> reliable internet connections with sufficient bandwidth, not to mention
> that the company would have to get one in the first place, which isn't
> much easier to get, if any.

That depends on where you are.
The company could host the servers in a decent datacentre, which should take 
care of the bandwidth issues.
For the employees, if they want to work from home, it's up to them to ensure 
they have a reliable connection.

> It might work in theory.  How would it be feasible in practise?

Plenty of companies do it this way. If you don't want to pay for software like 
XenDesktop, you need to do all the work setting it up yourself.

--
Joost