Does OS X have terminal services capabilities? Will it ever? I administer a Citrix server farm and just kinda wondered if OS X could do this sort of thing.???
Does OS X have terminal services capabilities? Will it ever? I administer a Citrix server farm and just kinda wondered if OS X could do this sort of thing.???
Terminal is a vt52/100/102/xterm application installed by default in your Utilities folder.
A Unix system would be a bit hobbled without a terminal, wouldn't it? (And there's a Citrix client for MacOS X.)
Or are you asking for terminal *serving*? Not sure if ssh et al are what you're looking for, but yes, included.
I'm not talking about the terminal program in OS X. I'm talking about the ability to "publish" applications, documents, and desktops from a server or server farm, as I can do with Citrix running on Windows server.
I don't think Apple Remote Desktop is what I'm thinking of either - cuz that's more like just a VNC type thing, right?
Just curious if OS X has the Citrix type capability.
Does OS X have terminal services capabilities? Will it ever? I administer a Citrix server farm and just kinda wondered if OS X could do this sort of thing.???
Not really.
ARD is more like VNC or MS RDC, single user remote control.
I think the closest thing you'll find is NetBoot, but it really only lets you publish OS images, not individual apps.
That being said, most OS X Apps are pretty cool in that there's no installation, just drag-to-install. What's cool about that is that you should, theoretically, be able to have a shared network volume with the apps you want all the users to have access to and run them from there.
Better yet, (somewhat), just run it directly off the network drive. Can be slow in some situations if the app needs a lot of disk access to the original files, but once loaded in, it's as fast as running it purely local.
I know what you want, and you can of course do it with X11 programs already, but i don't see it being available for Quartz apps any time soon. I would love to offer cross-platform remote display to thin clients from an Xserve farm, since many of my larger educational clients want to deliver their standard school environment to students working remotely. Perhaps a mac mini array with each box running VNC, fronted by a redirector? :-) :-) (only half joking).
Citrix Servers and Windows Terminal Server (based on code Microsoft bought from Citrix) are mostly used to provide an easy way of managing an application install in one place. Rather than trying to do all the leg work of either installing an app on a large range of computers, or working on ghosting an image onto every computer an IT department will just put Citrix/Teerminal Client onto every machine, and then set them up to go to the server.
Apple's response to this need is Apple Remote Desktop's section that used to be called "Macintosh Manager" and Netboot. Either of these technologies allow you to setup end user stations with the apps and environment that you want without having to do machine-by-machine work. They still allow the flexibility of the Terminal Services, without breaking the UI by having the apps be non-native.
Both ideas have advantage, and I don't see Apple going the Terminal Services route any time soon.
I'd be more curious in doing something more like X11 where the interface is running on a remote computer but the application is still executing on the server. I wonder if the controller view architecture that most applications adhere to allow for this?
I was thinking that the server may be able to first send the NIB over to the client to start running, launch the controller object locally. Then, capture and pipe the messages between objects appropriatly.
Since it is ObjC messages being sent over the network instead of JPEGs, would this be more efficient?
With the dynamic nature of ObjC, could a third party replace a set of parent objects at runtime allowing any Cocoa application to be run in client/server mode? Would Apple ever build this into the API?
The reason I was thinking of this was to run intensive applications on my iMac G5 but have the display on my iBook without the sluggishness of VNC.
NeXT and MacOS X Server 1.0 both provided a display model that could do exactly that. However, with the addition of Carbon and the birth of Quartz this technique became very difficult to maintain, and was dropped. Since then there has been a lot of work poured into hardware accelerating Quartz, and it is likely that this work has made network transparency, like you are thinking of, more difficult than it is worth.
I seriously doubt that something like this could be done by a third party without access to the Quartz code.
As Karl said, Quartz does not support Terminal Services-like operation. And I predict that it won't in the future, either, because thin clients are not in Apple's financial interests.
Code Rebel has debuted with iRAPP 1.0, a program that lets Windows users run applications residing on their Mac systems. It also allows multiple Windows users to connect to multiple OSX accounts on the same Mac machine, making it the first terminal services solution for OSX.
Code Rebel is currently working on the Mac to Mac and Mac to PC options.
Comments
Terminal is a vt52/100/102/xterm application installed by default in your Utilities folder.
A Unix system would be a bit hobbled without a terminal, wouldn't it?
Or are you asking for terminal *serving*? Not sure if ssh et al are what you're looking for, but yes, included.
Originally posted by Macvault
Does OS X have terminal services capabilities? Will it ever? I administer a Citrix server farm and just kinda wondered if OS X could do this sort of thing.???
You are thinking about Apple Remote Desktop.
Originally posted by Kickaha
??
Terminal is a vt52/100/102/xterm application installed by default in your Utilities folder.
A Unix system would be a bit hobbled without a terminal, wouldn't it?
Or are you asking for terminal *serving*? Not sure if ssh et al are what you're looking for, but yes, included.
I'm not talking about the terminal program in OS X. I'm talking about the ability to "publish" applications, documents, and desktops from a server or server farm, as I can do with Citrix running on Windows server.
I don't think Apple Remote Desktop is what I'm thinking of either - cuz that's more like just a VNC type thing, right?
Just curious if OS X has the Citrix type capability.
Software Distribution
ARD is your best bet.
Originally posted by Macvault
Does OS X have terminal services capabilities? Will it ever? I administer a Citrix server farm and just kinda wondered if OS X could do this sort of thing.???
Not really.
ARD is more like VNC or MS RDC, single user remote control.
I think the closest thing you'll find is NetBoot, but it really only lets you publish OS images, not individual apps.
That being said, most OS X Apps are pretty cool in that there's no installation, just drag-to-install. What's cool about that is that you should, theoretically, be able to have a shared network volume with the apps you want all the users to have access to and run them from there.
Not quite as nice as Citrix, but it's a thought.
Originally posted by Macvault
Does OS X have terminal services capabilities? Will it ever?
No.
Originally posted by wmf
No.
Why do you just sa "NO"? Can you explain? There's got to be a way to do this in OS X. There is even a version of Citrix Presentation Server for UNIX.
Apple's response to this need is Apple Remote Desktop's section that used to be called "Macintosh Manager" and Netboot. Either of these technologies allow you to setup end user stations with the apps and environment that you want without having to do machine-by-machine work. They still allow the flexibility of the Terminal Services, without breaking the UI by having the apps be non-native.
Both ideas have advantage, and I don't see Apple going the Terminal Services route any time soon.
I was thinking that the server may be able to first send the NIB over to the client to start running, launch the controller object locally. Then, capture and pipe the messages between objects appropriatly.
Since it is ObjC messages being sent over the network instead of JPEGs, would this be more efficient?
With the dynamic nature of ObjC, could a third party replace a set of parent objects at runtime allowing any Cocoa application to be run in client/server mode? Would Apple ever build this into the API?
The reason I was thinking of this was to run intensive applications on my iMac G5 but have the display on my iBook without the sluggishness of VNC.
I seriously doubt that something like this could be done by a third party without access to the Quartz code.
Code Rebel has debuted with iRAPP 1.0, a program that lets Windows users run applications residing on their Mac systems. It also allows multiple Windows users to connect to multiple OSX accounts on the same Mac machine, making it the first terminal services solution for OSX.
Code Rebel is currently working on the Mac to Mac and Mac to PC options.