[Thinlinc-technical] engineering my Sun Ray replacement

[John P Arends]

My suggestion would be that you re-work your design a bit rather than trying to use ThinLinc as a drop in replacement. I'd probably make the system chooser part of the PXE boot image and for those who connect to Windows, they can just go that route from there and never touch ThinLinc.

Then use ThinLinc instead of XDMCP, which is more secure anyway.

If you step back 100,000 feet the reason you're using the SunRay software in kiosk mode is because you can't run apps locally on the SunRay clients you have. If you switch to other clients, you have that flexibility, so there's really no reason to add layers of complexity (PXE boot-> ThinLinc -> rdesktop) when you can just run rdesktop locally on the machine after it is PXE booted.

John Arends
Senior Systems Engineer
School of Communication
Northwestern University 
847-491-5789

On Jul 18, 2013, at 3:48 PM, Seth Galitzer <sgsax at ksu.edu>
 wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
> Like many others this week, I'm making my way here in light of the official death knell of the Sun Ray product line.  Thanks to those lurking on the Sunray-Users list who brought me here.
> 
> Ultimately, what I'd like to do is use Thinlinc as a drop-in replacement for my SRS installation.  I think I do my Sun Ray setup a little different than most, and I'm hoping for some guidance on how to replicate that in Thinlinc.  My clients boot up and run what used to be called a kiosk app.  Basically, they go straight to a desktop without initial user login and run a single application (without a full desktop shell).
> 
> In my case, the single application is what I call a session chooser, built using zenity.  The user can select from one of three sessions: two different WTS servers (via RDP), based on their login "realm", and a Linux server (via XDMCP).  Once the session is selected, the remote client runs and they are presented with a full-screen remote session for that host, where they log and continue using that desktop.
> 
> This setup is currently used for a teaching lab with 40 desktops.  All users should have their own concurrent independent sessions on whatever host they eventually connect to.  We have considered expanding to include office staff systems eventually, but for now, the lab is the primary focus.
> 
> On the thin client devices themselves, I'm exploring options for hardware replacements (too bad the DTUs have closed firmware), thanks also for the many recommendations on that subject.  I figure I'll need a PXE-boot setup, which I more or less know how to do already.  I've just started working through the documentation, but I could use a little guidance in streamlining the software setup to match (or at least come close to) what I described above.  Pointers in the right direction would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks in advance, and looking forward to continuing this adventure.
> 
> Seth
> 
> -- 
> Seth Galitzer
> Systems Coordinator
> Computing and Information Sciences
> Kansas State University
> http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~sgsax
> sgsax at ksu.edu
> 785-532-7790
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