[Thinlinc-technical] tl-best-winserver on client side?!?

[Peter Astrand]

Hi. The tl-wts-tools package includes a tl-loadagent service, running on 
port 5667. When RDP connections are initiated (through tl-run-rdesktop or 
similar commands), the load of the servers in the selected Application 
Server Group are fetched, and a suitable server is selected. In modern 
versions of ThinLinc, tl-run-rdesktop et al can fetch this via an internal 
Python API. tl-best-winserver has remained as a debugging tool.

There are a few problems with using tl-best-winserver directly on a 
client:

It's difficult to move this tool out of the ThinLinc server software. It 
depends on Python modules from /opt/thinlinc/modules/. Thus, you would 
need to install chunks from the TL server software on every client. 
Strictly speaking, this is not allowed by the license agreement. This will 
also not work on clients which does not fulfill all of the server 
requirements. For example, few thin terminals have a Python installation. 
And it would not work at all from Windows clients.


ThinLinc is from the start designed to handle multiple session types, 
including RDP, and there are many advantages with this. For example, you 
only need one client software, open up one network port etc to handle all 
session / profile types. Our profile selector can be customized so that 
users either can select the type themselves, or it can be configured so 
that some users/groups automatically get a certain profile. Another 
advantage is that all network traffic is encrypted through SSH, which is 
typically considered more safe than RDP.

"Pass-through sessions", ie ThinLinc sessions which connects to other 
terminals, consumes fairly little resources on the ThinLinc servers.

Thus, our recommendation is that you always login through ThinLinc.

Best regards,
Peter Astrand


>Coming back to my own thread. Is there nobody who can provide more 
>technical information on how the tl-best-winserver command actually works 
>and how one can query this information via own socket calls to the 
>tl-load-agent installed on a windows server? We really need that 
>functionality to improve our clustered windows server environment.

>
>best regards,
>jens
>
>Am 08.07.2013 um 15:21 schrieb Jens Langner <J.Langner at hzdr.de>:
>
>> Hello,
>> 
>> as already stated in here a while ago, we have a NUC-driven 
>> ThinClient/ThinLinc environment where we not only connect to our 
>> ThinLinc server for UNIX-kinda connections. When our NUCs are started 
>> we present the users a GUI to choose the server and if the server is a 
>> windows server it directly connects to this windows server via rdesktop 
>> rather than routing the user through ThinLinc. The reason for this is 
>> that we don't want to load the ThinLinc servers with users that only 
>> connect to windows servers.
>> 
>> Now that ThinLinc itself provides functionality between windows servers 
>> via the tl-wts-tools.exe and its corresponding tl-best-winserver 
>> command we are wondering if there is a possibility that we can have a 
>> similar command on the client side where we also start tlclient so that 
>> we can query which windows server in a group we should connect to.
>> 
>> So is there a client side command which prints out equal information 
>> like tl-best-winserver does on the server side? And if not, is there a 
>> possibility to easily create such a command or query the information 
>> that the service (tl-wts-tools.exe) provides via network? In the end we 
>> would need a short documentation on how we can query the rating of each 
>> windows server over network.
>> 
>> Any help would be appreciated.
>> 
>> best regards,
>> jens
>
>
>
>-- 
>Dr. Jens Langner
>Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf
>Institute of Radiopharmaceutical Cancer Research
>Department of Positron Emission Tomography
>POB 51 01 19, 01314 Dresden, Germany
>http://www.hzdr.de/ | +49 351 260 2757
>
>Vorstand: Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Roland Sauerbrey
>Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Peter Joehnk
>VR 1693 beim Amtsgericht Dresden
>

---
Peter Astrand		ThinLinc Chief Developer
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