[Thinlinc-technical] Praise, and questions ...

[Andreas v. Heydwolff]

Greetings, and a happy new year to the Cendio staff and to the listmembers!

I've been using TL Version 4.0.0 (build 3705) on Debian Wheezy in my
small office environment on IGEL UD clients and connecting to the office
server from home since a few weeks, and so far am very pleased with the
overall performance. The agent is running with

 # -br -nolisten tcp -localhost -KeyboardMap=de (thanks again, Peter!)

So, first of all, kudos for a very good product!

Nevertheless, some experiences gave rise to questions. Perhaps I just
need a hint or two to resolve something, or a bug report or wish-list
item needs to be created? Here goes:

1) a couple times I tried to reconnect from one location to a session I
had interrupted at the other location only to find out that both Master
and Agent were no longer running. The closest I got in terms of Bugzilla
was #4380 but I am not running Ubuntu but Debian Wheezy on the server,
and Master and Agent were not restarted but were just not running any
more. Any hint how to debug this?

2) Keyboards: with "-KeyboardMap=de" as long as I stay with the same
model, it works. Logged in from the Debian software client on my Dell
laptop the session is unusable as only part of the keys provide expected
behavior. Would I need to use a laptop with an exact same version of
-KeyboardMap=de which was modeled after a standard USB keyboard? Might
make TL a bit difficult to use for road warriors with German keyboards
on their laptops, if I am not mistaken.

3) any plans/chance that a Sun Type 7 keyboard in German could be added
to the keyboard maps? I like their F13-F20 and sound volume and on/off keys.

4) external drives: the IGEL's "custom" partition that I registered in
the TL client's options gets recognized and displayed. When I plug a USB
pendrive into the IGEL it gets auto-mounted there on /media/<usbdevice>
but the thindrives directory of my user account on the TL server
(KDE4.8.4' dolphin) does not get updated. It even loses the previously
seen "custom" partition while the USB device does not get registered.

5) Sound recording: with a Plantronics headset with 3.5mm plugs I can
record for example my counting of numbers from 1 to 20 on the server,
but often one or two of the mostly latter few numbers would be echoed -
this is unusable with dictation software in a VBox WinXP machine on the
server. The problem is not the connection on the server to the XP
machine: a native Linux audacity recording on the server would already
have the echoing. Seems to be some transmission issue between client and
server. With a Sennheiser USB headset this does not happen - only I had
to jump through loops and find out how to set the recording volume on
the command line of the IGEL as its alsamixer did not adjust the volume
far enough up. Perhaps all of this is an IGEL issue though (UD5-LX720,
latest firmware)?

6) Sound playback currently is stuttering at about 3Hz, not sure why
this is. Some clipping issue? This had not been the case before I
started trying out the Sennheiser headset. But then again I just upped
the recording volume, not playback, and playback through the monitor's
speakers also stutters.

7) Could there be a way perhaps in the future to make pulseaudio use the
headset for recording and the external speakers for playback? I guess
some extra negotiation between pulse on the server and in the client
pulseaudio plus a setting button would be necessary for this to happen.

8) Pulseaudio: For some time I had to manually start the pulseaudio
daemon for the user on the server to have any sound at all. For reasons
I do not understand currently this is not necessary any more. I have
bi-directional sound via pulse, but then there is the stuttering now.

9) A native connection, i.e., one that does not use SSH, over the LAN
does not work here. Maybe I am missing a setting I would need to change?
I always have SSH compression unchecked in the client's options, but
when I also uncheck SSH encryption, an error message tells me the server
could not be reached, and I should try using encryption. It's not a
firewall issue, as the error message suggests. I tried to use a native
connection as an attempt to resolve the sound stuttering issue.

As an aside - scanning with saned over the network works very well. I
found out which version of the saned binary to install on the IGEL's
custom partition, and it bypasses the TL setup which is ok in my trusted
environment.

Hope a few answers can be found -

Best regards,

Andreas v. Heydwolff