[winswitch] awesome project, newbie questions

[Antoine Martin]

On 01/08/15 01:57, Barry Smoke wrote:
> General statement, I'm trying to get detailed general overview about how winswitch works internally, and why the limitations exist on windows.
>
> See below:
>
>> I stumbled across this project while looking deeper into nomachine nx, and comparable remote protocols.
>> I spent an afternoon learning about the winswitch gui, and connecting windows pc's together remotely.
>> the client obviously has full support for the various remote connection protocols, vnc, nx, xpra, rdp, and various others.
>> there seems to be no way to force a different protocol to be used for windows connections, although the note on the website indicates a licensing issue, not the technology is at fault.
>>> I think you are referring to this page:
>>> https://winswitch.org/documentation/protocols/rdp.html
>>> Every version of windows is capable of running as a RDP server, but Microsoft charges you more for the privilege.
> Yes, correct.  The statement:
> "Window Switch can only use RDP to connect to a Microsoft Windows machine and forward the desktop to the client's display. 
> Although there are other features and other servers, these are not supported at present.
> (Mostly due to unnecessary licensing restrictions which have nothing to do with the technology)"
> That leads the reader to think that technically, it might be a possibility to enable the functionality, maybe even use a version detection routine to figure out the licensing issue on a per server basis, right?
We already do exactly that:
http://winswitch.org/trac/browser/trunk/winswitch/virt/rdp_common_util.py
>> how difficult would it be to enable a selection of the protocol to use for client to client connections on windows, for use as an internal remote assistance utility?
>>> I'm not sure what you are asking.
>> Does the client software act as a server, as I figured out a default port of 32123 is used for connections.
>>> Usually, the applet starts a local server so that you can also access session on that machine.
>>> This can be disabled.
>>> The port you refer to is the winswitch port.
>> Or, would nx server software, and xpra server software have to be run, to connect the session to?
>>> I don't understand the question, sorry!
>> Is there a design doc, or diagram showing the internal workflow?  I did download the source, but haven't dug through too deep yet.
>>> I'm afraid there isn't, only the code and the documentation on the website:
>>> https://winswitch.org/documentation/
> I'll compile the above into one question.  Since the issue of only using rdp is a licensing issue, the questions above are meant to determine the design of winswitch, and routing of sessions.
> Is it possible to enable windows to windows xpra, or nx sessions as is, or would xpra server, or nx server need to be ported to windows?
Xpra already runs as a shadow server on Windows but this is not exposed
through the winswitch gui yet.
There are plans to take this further in Xpra:
* to allow hardware encoding to speed things up:
http://xpra.org/trac/ticket/558
* speed up pixel capture:
http://xpra.org/trac/ticket/389
* seamless mode:
http://xpra.org/trac/ticket/897

I don't think you will ever see an open source NX server on Windows (but
will gladly be proven wrong), the NX code dates back to monolithic X11
servers!

Cheers
Antoine
>
>
> Cheers
> Antoine
>> Thanks,
>> Barry Smoke
>>
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