ncomputing: inventing a cheap pedal-driven car on two wheels
Already a long time ago on the Internet there are links to mythical thin clients for 50-60-70 bucks. Like, if there are such, why $ 200- $ 500? Moreover, several companies in our country are trying to sell them, and even move them to the market with the involvement of heavy artillery in the form of presentations, free buffets and road shows.
So, first the market historical part, and then the technical detail.
There was a firm, ncomputing. And she invented her own way of making terminal solutions. I emphasize solutions, not thin clients. About him more in the second part. This invention was not so cheap - under $ 150. It consisted of hardware and software. The software went “as if for free” (more precisely, the hardware was licensed for them with software). But the cunning Chinese ... made a creative understanding and made their own. The main thing is that they didn’t write their server, but instead hacked the old version of the software in a banal way. What sells for $ 50-70 is it. Without technical support, without updates (oh, how they are needed there), with a broken version of the critical for the program. In other words, typical panafonic and sonny stereos, sportswear from pyma and riibook. The very "Chinese fake", from the image of which the Chinese are trying to get away.
')
However, it is much more interesting to look at ncomputing itself, because it really is NOT RDP, it is NOT tsitriks, and they have ALL of their own.
Any terminal solution consists of server and client side. Traditionally, since the purchase of MS technology from citrix and the conclusion that tsitriks requires the purchase of a license for RDP (ie, TSCAL), the basis of all terminal modes was the terminal server mode in Windows. In NT4 it was a special edition (Terminal Edition, it seems), in 2k, 2003 and 2008 it is just a tick in the list of installed components.
But in fact, the terminal server is not just a server running RDP. Microsoft decayed thousands of Indians in the process of its implementation, but realized. So, what's in the terminal server mode different from the normal server mode?
These three points can be enabled manually without terminal problems, in the properties of the system.
But then begins the holy of holies. It:
(maybe I missed something, I read a book a long time ago ...)
This is the terminal server. And tcp-ica and tcp-rdp are only connectors to it.
But Microsoft wants for it $ 75 per user. And Ncomputing decides that they are smarter than Citrix and MS combined and makes their system. More precisely, two systems: X and L series.
The X-series works with its own application on a twisted pair pair of the fifth (5e?) Category between the device and the special card, it seems, on 5 devices stuck in PCI and PCI-E (there are such and such). Wires are very limited in length (I do not know how much, in past posts people talked about 10 meters). The board allows each of the users to see their workplace, almost (about this “almost” we will now tell) almost independently of each other.
The undoubted advantage of the X-series compared to the RDP is: high bandwidth (FullHD? No questions, though FullHD, since the zoom of a lower resolution retards). Sound and sync sound? Yes. Microphone - yes (in RDP only from version 6+ a microphone appeared, so for windows 2003 or tsitriks, or RDP without a microphone). With flash drives sucks (something works, something not). With printers everything is bad, but nobody cares, because The printer is plugged into the computer, and it (due to technology) is always close to users. Most likely, the same applies to scanners and other usb-jewelry.
In a small office, this is quite a good idea.
BUT! In the Soviet advertising ncomputing'a say that they say, "you will be one Windows for all yuzat will." Anyone who installed licensed Windows and was not too lazy to read the sort of paper that Microsoft RUS puts in this box could read the DIRECT ban on the use of multiplexers, which ncomputing refers to (for half a year I have already forgotten, or there is a general ban, or the requirement to buy licenses by the number of people ...) Those. stories about savings on licenses - nonsense. And not marketing, but impudent and encouraging criminality.
In addition to the X-series described above, there is an L-series operating over an ip network. It works with its own service running on Windows. This version is, firstly, more expensive, secondly, everything that was not very important in the X-series becomes critical: fucking flash drives, the lack of printers / scanners, completely wild traffic consumption, sensitivity to packet loss, jitter ( ) to large pings (for 150-200 ms it is almost non-usable, for comparison, this edge in the RDP passes by 600 ms, in citrix with local input - by 1000-1500 ms).
Actually, this is all with customers. Customers and clients. Sad starts on the server.
Since ncomputing money MS does not pay and contracts a la tsitriks / virtuozzo does not conclude, MS shouted at ncomputing. Literally. Periodically leaving patches from MS tightly kill a working server. The ncomputing forums are full of screams about this and the answer of the support "remove the KB so-and-so and do not put it until we fix it." And repairing is not a week or a month. Judge for yourself about the degree of reliability of the server, on which there is no critical update for 2-3 months, and another kiddo walks around the planet.
Since there is no need to pay for terminal licenses, you cannot use the terminal service either. So, bye-bye all the update:
1) Global mutexes are global. Thousands of applications do not even dream about the terminal server, they want to check "one copy of the program or several." Of course, in a multi-user environment, they interfere with each other.
2) No forwarding paths. This means where the program writes, there it goes. With all that it implies. For example, sharing win.ini. Or to c: \ program files \ bla-bla \ bla.dat. Which is not at all expected by programmers. From here glitches falling of a software.
3) No integration with AD. No policies, beautiful groups, global bans and permissions. All pens on each server and no way different.
4) There is no any attempt to go beyond one server. No connection broker, no farms, no cluster support.
5) Lack of any control over resources. At the presentation of ncomputing I managed with the help of three stupid batch file synchronously pouring 4 GB from the directory from under one user so that the admin could not locally enter the server service in a reasonable time. (As a test, they used a nice quad with satash screws - and at my work one of the minor terminal servers was 4 times more bad with iron with IDE screws of 20GB, and they dragged as many as 30 people who simply did not think about copying in two streams is evil).
6) In the server program itself, the rights are very dumb.
I personally did not check, as rumors say that in the process of operation, the service sometimes falls. Well, you know, like a spooler for driver curves. He fell down, restarted, the users reconnected everything, opened the Excel files, restored the automatically saved files, work on themselves without any problems.
In this way:
The X-series is good in its niche. Need a call center or something with a video for 2-5 people? Ok, ok. Did work. If someone is a hooligan, you can look into his eyes and he will stop. Collective responsibility, cooperative multitasking.
L-series is an enchanting G, completely unprepared for the enterprise and the quiet life of a sysadmin.
UPD: As suggested in the comments, there are people who tried to implement it (I only considered them, but did not try to work with them):
habrahabr.ru/blogs/sysadm/91060
So, first the market historical part, and then the technical detail.
Story
There was a firm, ncomputing. And she invented her own way of making terminal solutions. I emphasize solutions, not thin clients. About him more in the second part. This invention was not so cheap - under $ 150. It consisted of hardware and software. The software went “as if for free” (more precisely, the hardware was licensed for them with software). But the cunning Chinese ... made a creative understanding and made their own. The main thing is that they didn’t write their server, but instead hacked the old version of the software in a banal way. What sells for $ 50-70 is it. Without technical support, without updates (oh, how they are needed there), with a broken version of the critical for the program. In other words, typical panafonic and sonny stereos, sportswear from pyma and riibook. The very "Chinese fake", from the image of which the Chinese are trying to get away.
')
However, it is much more interesting to look at ncomputing itself, because it really is NOT RDP, it is NOT tsitriks, and they have ALL of their own.
Technical part
Any terminal solution consists of server and client side. Traditionally, since the purchase of MS technology from citrix and the conclusion that tsitriks requires the purchase of a license for RDP (ie, TSCAL), the basis of all terminal modes was the terminal server mode in Windows. In NT4 it was a special edition (Terminal Edition, it seems), in 2k, 2003 and 2008 it is just a tick in the list of installed components.
But in fact, the terminal server is not just a server running RDP. Microsoft decayed thousands of Indians in the process of its implementation, but realized. So, what's in the terminal server mode different from the normal server mode?
- Small tics of processor time. The smaller the ticks, the higher the empty load on the processor to switch the context of processes, but the more responsive the system is. This is critical for interactive applications with a bunch of people at the same time.
- Equal allocation of processor time to all foreground applications. In the classical system with Windows, the foreground application is one, and in the server edition (I can lie, it seems, not one at all).
- Memory with priority on applications, but not on cache.
These three points can be enabled manually without terminal problems, in the properties of the system.
But then begins the holy of holies. It:
- Replacing global system mutexes with user local
- Automatic redirection of requests to the system directory in a subdirectory in the user profile. In Vista / 7, this is even implemented on the desktop, but for the first time this technology appeared in the terminal service. The rules allow you to specify which calls are redirected. This applies to both the file system and HKLM in the registry.
- Automatic configuration of the application for the needs of the user. Anyone who has worked with the terminal server knows about the strange window with the next, next, finish buttons that appear when you start installing applications. This is it.
- manually switchable application and installation modes (manual editing of what could not be determined on the machine) - change user / install and change user / execute commands.
- a little documented but quite working mode of automatic braking of applications that are too aggressively devouring resources (for example, polling the keyboard in an empty cycle), which can also be manually configured. Among all multi-user access solutions, this is the ONLY one I have seen that can control the aggressiveness of application disk operations.
(maybe I missed something, I read a book a long time ago ...)
This is the terminal server. And tcp-ica and tcp-rdp are only connectors to it.
But Microsoft wants for it $ 75 per user. And Ncomputing decides that they are smarter than Citrix and MS combined and makes their system. More precisely, two systems: X and L series.
The X-series works with its own application on a twisted pair pair of the fifth (5e?) Category between the device and the special card, it seems, on 5 devices stuck in PCI and PCI-E (there are such and such). Wires are very limited in length (I do not know how much, in past posts people talked about 10 meters). The board allows each of the users to see their workplace, almost (about this “almost” we will now tell) almost independently of each other.
The undoubted advantage of the X-series compared to the RDP is: high bandwidth (FullHD? No questions, though FullHD, since the zoom of a lower resolution retards). Sound and sync sound? Yes. Microphone - yes (in RDP only from version 6+ a microphone appeared, so for windows 2003 or tsitriks, or RDP without a microphone). With flash drives sucks (something works, something not). With printers everything is bad, but nobody cares, because The printer is plugged into the computer, and it (due to technology) is always close to users. Most likely, the same applies to scanners and other usb-jewelry.
In a small office, this is quite a good idea.
BUT! In the Soviet advertising ncomputing'a say that they say, "you will be one Windows for all yuzat will." Anyone who installed licensed Windows and was not too lazy to read the sort of paper that Microsoft RUS puts in this box could read the DIRECT ban on the use of multiplexers, which ncomputing refers to (for half a year I have already forgotten, or there is a general ban, or the requirement to buy licenses by the number of people ...) Those. stories about savings on licenses - nonsense. And not marketing, but impudent and encouraging criminality.
In addition to the X-series described above, there is an L-series operating over an ip network. It works with its own service running on Windows. This version is, firstly, more expensive, secondly, everything that was not very important in the X-series becomes critical: fucking flash drives, the lack of printers / scanners, completely wild traffic consumption, sensitivity to packet loss, jitter ( ) to large pings (for 150-200 ms it is almost non-usable, for comparison, this edge in the RDP passes by 600 ms, in citrix with local input - by 1000-1500 ms).
Actually, this is all with customers. Customers and clients. Sad starts on the server.
Ncomputing server
Since ncomputing money MS does not pay and contracts a la tsitriks / virtuozzo does not conclude, MS shouted at ncomputing. Literally. Periodically leaving patches from MS tightly kill a working server. The ncomputing forums are full of screams about this and the answer of the support "remove the KB so-and-so and do not put it until we fix it." And repairing is not a week or a month. Judge for yourself about the degree of reliability of the server, on which there is no critical update for 2-3 months, and another kiddo walks around the planet.
Since there is no need to pay for terminal licenses, you cannot use the terminal service either. So, bye-bye all the update:
1) Global mutexes are global. Thousands of applications do not even dream about the terminal server, they want to check "one copy of the program or several." Of course, in a multi-user environment, they interfere with each other.
2) No forwarding paths. This means where the program writes, there it goes. With all that it implies. For example, sharing win.ini. Or to c: \ program files \ bla-bla \ bla.dat. Which is not at all expected by programmers. From here glitches falling of a software.
3) No integration with AD. No policies, beautiful groups, global bans and permissions. All pens on each server and no way different.
4) There is no any attempt to go beyond one server. No connection broker, no farms, no cluster support.
5) Lack of any control over resources. At the presentation of ncomputing I managed with the help of three stupid batch file synchronously pouring 4 GB from the directory from under one user so that the admin could not locally enter the server service in a reasonable time. (As a test, they used a nice quad with satash screws - and at my work one of the minor terminal servers was 4 times more bad with iron with IDE screws of 20GB, and they dragged as many as 30 people who simply did not think about copying in two streams is evil).
6) In the server program itself, the rights are very dumb.
I personally did not check, as rumors say that in the process of operation, the service sometimes falls. Well, you know, like a spooler for driver curves. He fell down, restarted, the users reconnected everything, opened the Excel files, restored the automatically saved files, work on themselves without any problems.
In this way:
The X-series is good in its niche. Need a call center or something with a video for 2-5 people? Ok, ok. Did work. If someone is a hooligan, you can look into his eyes and he will stop. Collective responsibility, cooperative multitasking.
L-series is an enchanting G, completely unprepared for the enterprise and the quiet life of a sysadmin.
UPD: As suggested in the comments, there are people who tried to implement it (I only considered them, but did not try to work with them):
habrahabr.ru/blogs/sysadm/91060
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/91020/
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