Guacamole – A clientless remote desktop gateway

https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/

by mutin-sa • 9 years ago

1096 216 9 years ago

guacamole.incubator.apache.org

makmanalp2• 9 years ago

Agh, I so want this to be good. With remote desktop, I think one thing that makes a product in this area stand out is how it handles delay, packet loss and bandwidth issues. There's a ton of stuff re: adaptively changing quality and keyframe frequency, sending delta updates for parts of the screen, compressing the data, and doing all this without pegging the cpu at 100% etc etc.

Teamviewer and Nomachine NX are two examples that I use a ton that seem to have most of this stuff figured out, whereas their competitors seems to work in theory, whereas in practice they are bloated, they lag, they make my computer fan go crazy, etc.

Another thing is ease of connection through NAT/firewalls, though for that this seems to shift the burden on the server setup.

wpietri• 9 years ago

Huh. Does anybody know what the good clients use as a transport? E.g., are they UDP-based? A quick skim of the docs suggests that this only uses HTTP and Websockets, which I understand are TCP-based. The only browser thing I know of does an unreliable transport is WebRTC, but that currently isn't supported: https://glyptodon.org/jira/browse/GUAC-815

marktangotango3• 9 years ago

You http to the quacamole server, that server runs quacd that handles vnc, rdp to the desktop you want to reach. It's a proxy essentially.

niutech6• 9 years ago

ScreenCat (https://github.com/maxogden/screencat) is using WebRTC, but it is currently Mac-only.

leni536• 9 years ago

I had good experiences with x2go [1]. I also tried winswitch, as I remember it worked well too [2]. Both support the NX protocol.

About NAT/firewall zerotier[3] solves most of my issues.

[1] https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php

[2] http://winswitch.org/

[3] https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne

wiz21c• 9 years ago

X2GO is extremely reliable for me. But speed is not good compared to teamviewer (which had a lot of stability issues on linux when I tested it 3-4 years ago)

XorNot• 9 years ago

x2go is great. I desperately want to see VirtualGL integration in it though so you can run egl compositors with local rendering (since GPUs on VMs are still uncommon).

The other thing RDP is amazing at that I haven't seen Linux do well at all is resuming local sessions remotely and vice versa - with RDP it feels integrated, with x2go you're back to just transferring frames.

CodeWriter232• 9 years ago

pcANYWHERE for Windows had this all figured out in the late 80’s. They hooked GDI and transported the API calls wherever possible. It worked awesomely over a 56k modem. Then the guys involved sold to Symantec, and they let it go fallow, EOLing it in 2014 after 7 years of no updates.

bitwize4• 9 years ago

pcANYWHERE for Windows had this all figured out in the late 80’s. They hooked GDI and transported the API calls wherever possible.

RDP does the same; the early revs were basically GDI over wire. Later versions would have extensions/hax to transport the DirectX stuff (did they just ship framebuffers? I dunno).

tomaskafka• 9 years ago

That's what RDP does, it's so much better than any 'transferring the image of screen' software like VNC or Teamviewer.

Theodores• 9 years ago

Strange pcAnywhere has fallen by the wayside. That was de-facto in some support jobs I did and you could expect customers to have it for support. What do people use now if pcAnywhere is not there?

I don't do support but I did use it in non-support roles, I just can't imagine the use case nowadays.

voidmain00013• 9 years ago

About 12 years ago I deployed Windows Terminal Server in a corporate environment, and used PXE boot on the client computers to start a basic Linux distro that then launched the 2X client to access TS. Right now I'm creating a reference document for a VDI deployment using VMware/Citrix/TS. I've briefly looked at the NoMachine client by installing it to a Win10 computer, and the performance of NoMachine is worse than RDP to the same computer over the same link. Since you're happy with NoMahchine do you know of any optimization techniques for it?

makmanalp2• 9 years ago

Hmm - I haven't really administered Nomachine myself (we have an enterprise installation on one of the clusters at work), so I can't really help you there unfortunately, but only to say that it doesn't often crash or hang for me, and the delay is quite low enough over wan that using the GUI / mouse works almost perfectly, both on OSX and windows.

cat199• 9 years ago

RDP is pretty darn fast (at least when I last used it ~10y ago)

I think the attraction to NX for linux users is that it is still way better than VNC.. and both of which are pretty much the only consistently functioning / packaged server options for most distros without fiddling..

pixelcloud• 9 years ago

I've been using XRDP for a while now. Works extremely well.

markbnj• 9 years ago

I've been a nomachine fan for a few years now, use it to access my linux work laptop from my windows gaming desktop. It has some minor irritations but on the whole it handles this use case quite well. I'll definitely be giving guacamole a shot though.

sjellis3• 9 years ago

Teradici PCoIP is proprietary, but absolutely, amazingly good. It is licensed by various thin client and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure products, like AWS WorkSpaces. RDP is also really effective.

I use both, but Teradici is the one that made me abandon my local Windows VMs.

wesm• 9 years ago

I'm sorry to be pedantic but can you add "(incubating)" to the title of the post?

el_duderino• 9 years ago

Previous discussion from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744430

victor106• 9 years ago

Does anyone here know how can I access my vpn connected work laptop from any computer outside for e.g:- my home laptop?

Cyph0n• 9 years ago

TeamViewer should work fine.

Minor grammatical note: "e.g." means "for example", so the phrase "for e.g." does not make sense. I used to make the same mistake quite a bit!

beachy• 9 years ago

I'm not so sure about that. The leading "for" stands on its own without the e.g.

e.g., with some additional punctuation:

I like to run for the bus.

I like to run for, for example, buses, cars and airplanes.

I like to run for e.g. buses, cars and airplanes.

A little tortured but possibly valid.

jlgaddis• 9 years ago

Any HN'ers happen to use Guacamole in order to gain access to Linux hosts (via SSH, of course) from an iPad? I'd be interested in hearing about how it works.

Alternatively, I'd take recommendations for an SSH client for the iPad that supports public/private key pairs and connecting through a bastion/jumpbox/etc. (a.k.a. the "ProxyCommand" SSH client directive).

Operyl• 9 years ago

Prompt works extremely well, but doesn’t directly support ProxyCommand. It has the ability to run a command on connect though!

gigatexal• 9 years ago

+1 to this.

jitl3• 9 years ago

Guacamole is awesome! I highly recommend it.

I used Guacamole + a 1st gen Chromebook as my laptop for several years of college work in 2012-2014.

Tasks that worked well:

- writing code in IntelliJ

- editing in Adobe Illustrator

- working in the terminal

- basic CAD in Sketchup

Tasks that I’d wait to do at home on my desktop:

- drawing, especially in Photoshop

- 3D work in Maya

- sound-latency sensitive work like MAX

gjvc• 9 years ago

"a couple" rather than "several" to be clear -- let's not exaggerate how long it's been around!

hnlmorg• 9 years ago

Since we're nitpicking: 2012-2014 can potentially be three years. The definition for "several" is relatively flexible since it's an approximate quantity. However what is agreed upon is that it has to be at least more than a couple, which three is.

So I'd argue the GP's post is valid as it is.

mihaifm• 9 years ago

Great tool indeed. To be honest even web browsing works just fine with it, as long as there is no animations to display.

I use it to get around my firewall at work, which seem to block anything apart http/https. If anyone knows a better solution than guacamole, let me know :)

pnutjam2• 9 years ago

I run a PC at home with x2go. I use it to surf the web among other things. Images are fine, video will stutter, sound generally works fine.

I used it for years with only a 1mb uplink, although I now have 10mb.

thomascgalvin• 9 years ago

We use Guacamole at work to give our customers access to the internally-hosted web app we're developing for them. I've been kind of amazed that it works as well as it does.

goblin89• 9 years ago

We use Guacamole at work to give our customers access to the internally-hosted web app we're developing for them.

Quite interested to hear more about your use case. Does it simplify access control? Is it just for accessing over HTTP, or e.g. over SSH?

nsxwolf2• 9 years ago

I’ve yet to find a good solution for remoting to a Mac from a Windows machine. Chrome Remote Desktop almost fits the bill, but I cannot get meta key bindings to work properly.

I will give this a try. Hoping it is good.

jitl3• 9 years ago

macOS has VNC and Remote Desktop servers built in; Ive never had issues with the functionality of either, although there are some security concerns

rcarmo• 9 years ago

Apple’s Remote Desktop protocol is VNC with extra features, not RDP.

nsxwolf2• 9 years ago

Also a "good" solution to me means the connection is established via some cloud mechanism, and doesn't require me to open a bunch of ports on my firewall.

And VNC on Mac has always had miserable usability for me - updates paint slowly from the top to the bottom of the screen, can't see my text in real time when I type.

TheSpiceIsLife• 9 years ago

Have you tried NoMachine?

cwyers• 9 years ago

The demo is a little weird. They open up VLC on Windows, but only to show off how it renders waveforms for an MP3. Is that a use case that people have for remoting into their PC?

matchu• 9 years ago

They're demonstrating Guacamole's ability to handle simple animations smoothly. Music visualizers are a solid, familiar example, despite not being a super-common use case for remote desktop.

solomatov• 9 years ago

Does anybody know whether it supports advanced features of RDP which allows very low latency and low bandwidth.

jitl3• 9 years ago

There’s 2 parts to any connection in Guacamole:

Your remote <———> guacd (RDP)

guacd <———> the browser (custom protocol)

In my experience, Guacamole works very well with windows RDP servers, and feels very fast. Certainly faster than X11 or VNC remoting on the same hardware.

asadlionpk3• 9 years ago

I have analyzed the websocket traffic and I think it does support those. It's very fast when used with RDP as compared to vnc.

hardwaresofton• 9 years ago

Everyone keep in mind that Guacamole has been around a long time -- I think it's just started being incubated by Apache, that's all.

Here's a walk-through from a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/4vdujw/guacamole_f...

nodesocket• 9 years ago

Shameless plug -- founder of https://commando.io here. We offer a product similar to Guacamole (agentless/clientless) SSH access to machines which is web based. We unfortunately only support SSH though. We have an iOS app as well so you can execute commands on servers on the go or from bed -- BedOps :-).

jcrites2• 9 years ago

Beautiful! I've been looking for something like this and hadn't heard of Guacamole.

Where I work, it's standard for developers to work using a "cloud desktop", i.e., a remote machine hosted in the cloud that's used for personal development with a very production-like environment [1]. When accompanied by a powerful laptop it's all most engineers need. However, client and server software for various protocols like RDP and VNC on various platforms is still a pain. It'd be great to have a simple and easy way to provide viable remote access built directly into servers -- from any client device with no prior setup. I'm glad to have come across this.

I'm curious how Guacamole's HTML5 rendering compares to solutions like the Ace editor when used to render terminals and text areas. At a high level, it looks like Guacamole is based on RealMint which uses the HTML5 canvas tag, whereas Ace manipulates regular text elements to effect styling. I'll have to experiment with them.

[1] And for that reason I was amused to see the following on the Guacamole home page: "Keep your desktop in the cloud: Desktops accessed through Guacamole need not physically exist. With both Guacamole and a desktop operating system hosted in the cloud, you can combine the convenience of Guacamole with the resilience and flexibility of cloud computing."

Razengan2• 9 years ago

it's standard for developers to work using a "cloud desktop"

Personally I prefer something like Apple's iCloud Drive; your files are downloaded locally and made available offline, letting you work on them with any device, even after it's disconnected from the Internet.

This lets my data stay mine, encrypted on my local storage, individually manageable and tag-able like all regular files, included in Time Machine etc. backups, and available even if iCloud Drive goes down.

For example, although you cannot compile full Xcode projects on iPads (yet), I can take code from them, edit it in Swift Playgrounds on my iPad, and copy it back into iCloud Drive for continuing on my iMac.

Razengan2• 9 years ago

Edit: That is not to say having access to a full desktop system from any device isn't desirable, but I do prefer my files to remain available on local storage.

asadlionpk3• 9 years ago

I want to know more about your 'cloud desktop' setup. I have tried to do it myself but it's quite laggy (like heavy lag in typing code, scrolling content). I wonder how you guys solve that.

I know Ace-like editor works great but it's usually a minimal web editor compared to something like Sublime running on vnc/rdp.

jcrites2• 9 years ago

One solution for remote development is to handle some heavy lifting like responsive display logic locally in the client. For two examples of this pattern, see Cloud9 IDE [1] (which builds on Ace) and Eclipse Che [2] (which uses the Orion editor). They're web-based IDEs that run remotely on the server, but load the content, such as the file tree and files you've opened, locally into your browser. So you can load your session from anywhere and no permanent state is kept on the client.

As far as protocols like RDP and NX go, I don't know of a silver bullet. I use machines hosted in Portland from my location in Seattle and the latency is low enough that remote UIs feel close to native. Some protocols are better than others at handling high-latency connections or low-bandwidth connections. I'd recommend testing a few and see what works best for your environment. You might also measure the round trip time: for any protocol that needs a round-trip with the server to update the display, the RTT will fundamentally bound the UI's responsiveness - to do better you have to load some display logic onto the client. Scrolling and character echo are two examples of logic that's really valuable to have on the client. (Many SSH clients have local predictive echo for that reason; they echo by default except when they've detected a password prompt)

I should clarify though that a lot of development takes place on a person's local laptop, synchronizing between that and the cloud desktop (such as with Git and other tools). The former provides responsiveness and the user's preferred OS and tools, while the latter provides a production-like OS with high performance that is better able to handle complex software stacks like multi-microservice applications or sizable ecommerce websites. It's also convenient to have a relatively pristine environment that isn't frequently interrupted by e.g. laptop hibernation and network changes.

[1] https://c9.io

[2] https://www.eclipse.org/che/

gsich• 9 years ago

Depends on how much latency you got. RDP and SSH can feel natively if latency is low enough.

bvm• 9 years ago

I tend to use Amazon Workspaces for this. It's a joy to work with(especially now it supports two screens). Having a desktop that is exactly the same wherever I am doesn't sound like much but is one of those small things that you really miss when it's gone. I'm not aware of any other providers, though I'm sure there are 1000s. One nice advantage of Workspaces is that it integrates with Amazon AD out of the box.

sjellis3• 9 years ago

There are surprisingly few providers, and AWS WorkSpaces is unusual in that it has no minimum number of desktops. One gotcha with WorkSpaces: it is cheap enough to make sense for just one user if you the free "Simple" AD option, but "Full" AD with GPO support etc. does add a cost (though not a significant one for a business).

godot• 9 years ago

I worked at a big hardware chip company 10~12 years ago and we also had a similar setup; except that the "cloud desktop" wasn't really a personal one, it's shared among the team. Whoever needs to do tasks that need the powerful machine to run will Remote Desktop into it; other than that normally you use the company laptop (which is pretty powerful for its time too). I don't remember having a lot of pain with Remote Desktop or VNC at the time; but the web client would certainly be cooler.

m3kw9• 9 years ago

Any reason why they presented it on windows 2000?

jagger27• 9 years ago

It looks like Windows 7 with the Classic theme.

turbohedgehog• 9 years ago

Can it do virtual desktops like a VNC server can?

edoceo• 9 years ago

This this is so cool! I've been using for years, even made a nice auth-hack

https://github.com/edoceo/guacamole-auth-http

CSDude2• 9 years ago

We had a project that can control qemu, xen, vmware and hyperv, Guacomole handled them all, and we integrated it easily, it supports both websockets and regular http polling, both works fast enough and nice

justinjlynn• 9 years ago

Any chance your integration code is available?

askz• 9 years ago

Maybe you should check his Github account ? https://github.com/mustafaakin/buki

CSDude2• 9 years ago

Sorry, it was a closed source project, If you need advice etc you can reach out

e9• 9 years ago

I wish I had this years ago. To do VNC and get around firewall/NAT issues I actually created port forwarder through Firebase. It surprisingly worked great https://github.com/rb365/fireport

I might try to make it work with Guacamole, web UI is definitely better than installing VNC client.

nameless9122• 9 years ago

I don't read many things that make my eyes go wide and my mind to be filled with "what in the actual fuck"s.

This is one of them.

nurettin• 9 years ago

Why didn't you use a dynamic DNS client? A lot of domain name providers have them.

djhworld• 9 years ago

You could just use ngrok for this https://ngrok.com/

godzillabrennus• 9 years ago

Reminds me of what http://Browserling has had for enabling access to browsers for their customers for years.

alea12• 9 years ago

How do we pronounce this?

unixhero• 9 years ago

Depends on what you say when at Taco Bell.

arde• 9 years ago

Gwack-ah-MOH-leh

lioeters• 9 years ago

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Guacamol...

candiodari• 9 years ago

I was making a cloud product a number of years back and wrote a similar product for my then employer. For VNC and SSH it's pretty easy to do in Javascript and can be quite reliable (much more so than telling customers how to connect using their own software - big difference in support). Even full-screen games were doable.

It provided something similar to phpvirtualbox + a screen where you'd (if properly authenticaed) just get access to your virtual machines just by going to a particular tab. Had a list of your VMs on the left, click on one, and a javascript starts up and gets a VNC javascript (started out with flash, swapped it out for a javascript one)

That said, this doesn't work as well as people here want it to. There is a significant cost to running in the browser (keyboard for instance, pressing CTRL-W will definitely generate a "wtf" moment a few times). But the speed and the fact that I couldn't do significant protocol development (VNC has something like 7 variations on protocol, integrating those into websocket is more than just encapsulating them if you want it to work well), means that I couldn't use the most efficient protocols. This meant that effectively there were resolution limits that weren't too high.

Lastly, javascript adds (a lot) of latency. It isn't much, and it sort of stays below 200 msec or so. But you'd be surprised how incredibly irritating it is to work with just 20msec extra latency. It's barely tolerable. For server admin work, sure (even then it's irritating). For constant development work, it's very irritating.

And full-screen games were doable because generally they would lower resolution and have other sources of lag. So they actually worked better than things like Eclipse and Visual Studio. Also they make you much less likely to hit browser keys. Especially old full screen games worked really well.

NicoJuicy• 9 years ago

Do you know how to make a client ssh application in HTML 5? Or what some resources are

tim--• 9 years ago

- https://xtermjs.org/

- https://github.com/billchurch/WebSSH2

chatmasta• 9 years ago

I've had a very positive experience with wetty[0] which uses the ChromeOS terminal emulator (hterm) on the client side, and communicates via websocket to a small node server that makes the SSH connection. I use it to provide a shell into an internal docker container used for managing some things. Everything "just works," even tmux key bindings.

[0] https://github.com/krishnasrinivas/wetty

numtel• 9 years ago

Shellinabox is available on ubuntu repos and it serves a short terminal using html5 that works great.

rkeene22• 9 years ago

Not SSH-based, but GoTTY works really well in my experience.

riskable2• 9 years ago

https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne

It can even display images in your browser if you do something like, 'cat someimage.jpeg'

(I wrote it)

andrewmd5• 9 years ago

You'd be really surprised how low you can get it, in one of my open source projects we have JPEG streaming and GPU accelerated capturing producing results as low as 50ms: https://github.com/Ulterius/server

In my current active project we have real-time streaming (< 10ms) working just fine in Chrome and Firefox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYRBRzevRDw

jorvi• 9 years ago

Off topic: there is a doomguy emoji.. what the hell? Is that just a trick with a custom font using an unused Unicode pointer?

niutech6• 9 years ago

JSMPEG-VNC also claims only ~50ms delay: http://phoboslab.org/log/2015/07/play-gta-v-in-your-browser-...

Ajedi32• 9 years ago

pressing CTRL-W will definitely generate a "wtf" moment a few times

FYI, a fix for that is coming soon: https://w3c.github.io/keyboard-lock/

LeifCarrotson• 9 years ago

You can hack around this by grabbing the "window.onbeforeunload" event to display the "Changes you have made to this page may not be saved: Leave/Stay" dialog when closing a tab. Reddit implements this when you're writing a comment, HN does not.

The nice thing about a remote desktop, though, is that you won't actually lose changes.

riskable2• 9 years ago

The problem with this proposal is that it only works with full-screen applications. Want to have multiple tabs open to many different desktops? Forget it. Ctrl-w will screw you.

Browsers already have an API for overriding built-in keyboard shortcuts: Event.preventDefault(). It's just that browser makers have chosen to ignore it for certain special keys like Ctrl-t and Ctrl-w.

em3rgent0rdr2• 9 years ago

Great idea. I hate the name. Name should have something obviously incommon with the feature/purpose.

Zhyl• 9 years ago

Are there any apache projects that do this?

nl• 9 years ago

The Apache webserver is so-named because it is a-patchy webserver (based on the NCSA webserver). They like their pun names..

hanoz• 9 years ago

If a server can be likened to an avocado, this enables people to expose its insides by removing the hardened outer layer, then trash the kernel and mash the rest to a pulp?

em3rgent0rdr2• 9 years ago

interesting...but that's quite a stretch IMHO!

joefarish• 9 years ago

A couple of useful articles for setting up a secure Guacamole environment:

•Enabling Duo Dual / Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for Guacamole Docker

https://www.cb-net.co.uk/linux/enabling-duo-dual-multi-facto...

•Using Let’s Encrypt with an NGINX Docker Container (plus bye-bye StartSSL!)

https://www.cb-net.co.uk/linux/using-lets-encrypt-with-an-ng...

patrickaljord• 9 years ago

Please don't use vimeo, it's terrible for people with slow connections (no 144p) and for people with fast connection there is no 2x speed mode to save time. Use Youtube or a service with similar feature.

thecrazyone• 9 years ago

Not sure why you're being down voted. I find the youtube experience superior to vimeo's

wccrawford• 9 years ago

Also, they've made it pretty clear they're about art, and they love to remove things that aren't. Like tutorials, or game recordings.

Though it does seem they started letting video game captures again, they still have the "creative expression" language.

https://vimeo.com/blog/post/new-upload-rules

sp3322• 9 years ago

Video game companies are getting increasingly strict about taking down videos, so Vimeo is probably just trying to avoid that hassle.

kodablah• 9 years ago

Also, the video is mp4 w/out fallback which doesn't work for those of us who compile our browsers w/out proprietary codecs/containers (admittedly pedantic and only applies to 0.0001%, but it applied to me).

zbraniecki2• 9 years ago

Like all Apache projects it seems like it's very well documented for engineers who work with it, but not really explained for newcomers :)

Does it log in into its own session or takes control over an active session on the machine?

My use case is this - My parent is using Ubuntu and in case she reports a problem, I'd like to be able to log into her session, share control over the mouse pointer so that she can show me what she's doing and I can also navigate around to uncheck the checkbox or sth like that.

Is Guacamole the right solution? If not, anyone knows a good one?

rkangel• 9 years ago

That's entirely down to configuration on the target. Guacamole is just an in browser client, so it depends how the server is set up.

For VNC, if your server is set up using X11VNC then you will be logging into the existing session, whereas if you set it up it TightVNC or Vnc4Server (can't remember what's in the Ubuntu repos) then it will be a separate session.

zbraniecki2• 9 years ago

hmm, I thought guacamole has both server and client.

The target machine is Ubuntu 17.10 on Wayland. Not sure if X11VNC will work with that :(

bitwize4• 9 years ago

RDP dude. Or something like GoToMyPC.

Open-source solutions for things like this are generally developed as infrastructure, or a basis for future work. Proprietary solutions are built for people to actually use.

mikewhy2• 9 years ago

RDP:

- Does not work on Ubuntu - Would not solve this issue - Needs a special licence to allow multiple users to connect simultaneously

voltagex_2• 9 years ago

Although the Linux version uses Wine, TeamViewer works well.

cerberusss• 9 years ago

I second TeamViewer, really like it and works across Windows, Linux and Mac.

I had a lot of trouble getting TeamViewer to install on my cloud VMs. It needs a physical desktop or something close to it. On DigitalOcean and Scaleway, this didn't work. On Vultr and Linode, it works fine.

sandos• 9 years ago

Searching for guacamole on github combined with recently updated shows a lot of unrelated repos. Apparently there is a github tutorial which uses a guacamole recipe, which makes searching for related things hard. I was trying to find an updated docker image for example.

joncampbelldev• 9 years ago

Google tends to be better than most in-site search, especially github.

"guacamole docker" returns a whole page of helpful resources (github, dockerhub etc)

_pfxa• 9 years ago

Clientless is a confusing term. The client seems to be served at an HTTP endpoint as a one page JS application.

bitwize4• 9 years ago

We're living in the age of the serverless Web, not to mention the meaningless technical term.

dawnerd• 9 years ago

I used it for a while in a docker container on my unraid server and it does work but is quite buggy still. Often will freeze up and require a restart.

JustinAiken• 9 years ago

I've been using it with the FileZilla docker in unraid; works but buggy describes it pretty well.

dalore• 9 years ago

Ok, anyone offering it as a service? Would be nice to have a low power laptop just to connect to a high powered guacamole instance, with IDEs and development tools installed. Able to snapshot etc.

marktangotango3• 9 years ago

I was wondering this too. I've been considering implementing a frontend "as a service" with it and charging something like a $10 annual fee. My use is I have a restrictive firewall at work to circumvent, would anyone else find a hosted quacamole solution worthwhile?

manigandham• 9 years ago

Similar:

https://www.paperspace.com/

https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/

shadoxx• 9 years ago

I'm gearing up to offer this as a service by the middle of next year. However, I have a couple fully functioning proofs of concept that I need people to test. If you'd like to get in on it, shoot me a PM.

marktangotango3• 9 years ago

There is no pm here?

asadlionpk3• 9 years ago

Hi, I would like to try this.

niutech6• 9 years ago

Isn't the Desktop as a Service what you need? If yes, check out OVH Virtual Cloud Desktop (https://www.ovh.co.uk/cloud/cloud-desktop/) or Amazon WorkSpaces.

saycheese• 9 years ago

"Thanks to HTML5" - what specifically in HTML5 enables this?

matteuan• 9 years ago

canvas, for example

have_faith• 9 years ago

What happens if you use Guacamole to log into a remote machine, and then use a browser on the remote machine to use Guacamole to control the initial client machine?

lr4444lr• 9 years ago

Sounds like the premise for a Douglas Hofstadter book.

rsp1984• 9 years ago

Question with the risk of sounding very stupid: I get that you don't need to install anything on the controlling machine, but what about the controlled machine? I suppose you need to install some kind of software there? There needs to be some kind of access control, no? I didn't see anything on the website though.

Which utterly obvious piece of the equation thing am I missing?

mjpa2• 9 years ago

It does say... "once Guacamole is installed on a server" so one would guess you do need Guacamole installed on the controlled machine...

emsy3• 9 years ago

Yes, you need a remote desktop server like VNC or RDP (or an SSH Server if you want a SSH session)

mjpa2• 9 years ago

Seems I'm the idiot then, missed the "gateway" bit... so this basically sits between something providing VNC/RDP and makes it accessible with just a web server?

rplnt• 9 years ago

I don't think that's enough, according to the video at least.

emsy3• 9 years ago

We've used Guacamole in production with a custom frontend. It's nice to work with and most problems I've encountered were covered in the old forums on SourceForge. For anyone planning to implement a custom frontend I'd recommend using WebSockets exclusively. We've had trouble with XHR based connections.

AlexC04• 9 years ago

I am really getting tired of programmer's "cute names for things". I recently went through training on adobe experience manager and literally every single internal technology was named for something that had no bearing on what it actually did. Felix, Sling, Jackrabbit ... I just did a quick google on the AEM tech stack and got the following choice quote which I feel perfectly illustrates the meaninglessness of Apache's naming "Apache Felix is to Apache Sling what Equinox is to Eclipse." what does any of that mean or do?!

I'd very much prefer if the named Guacamole the "Apache clientless remote desktop gateway"

vijaybritto2• 9 years ago

Guacamole is way easier to remember than Apache Clientless Remote Desktop Gateway. Also while seeking help it's a lot less characters, so people wouldn't be annoyed by typing.

lojack• 9 years ago

Or, worse yet, what it’d turn into.... Apache CRDG

guhidalg• 9 years ago

Did you forget the /s ? My eyes must be deceiving me.

When I hear Apache Guacamole, I'm thinking of Native American / Mexican fusion food.

davidkuhta• 9 years ago

It could also be intended to conjuring up imagery of yourself relaxing on an island in the Caribbean drinking a margarita, eating chips and Guacamole. A gateway to a clientless, remote, desktop getaway.

ams6110• 9 years ago

Disagree. Just because the name is longer doesn't mean it's harder to remember, because "Apache Clientless Remote Desktop Gateway" is much more descriptive.

Like GP, the trend over the last decade or so to use meaningless names for tech products is one of my biggest annoyances. Occasionally something gains such enough popularity that it doesn't matter ("Google") but in most cases these names are only meaningful to the people who work with these products every day and for everone else it's alphabet soup.

electroly• 9 years ago

That would be an amazing name. Tells me exactly what it does, and the acronym "CRDG" is short, and both the name and the acronym would be Googleable.

glhaynes• 9 years ago

So how about "Apache Clientless"? The name doesn't have to describe the entire functionality of the product, but it's nice for it to have some relevant signifier you can mentally associate with something.

rombert• 9 years ago

For Sling the explanation is right on the front page :-)

A device for serving content very fast.

TeMPOraL• 9 years ago

I think the idea behind meaningless names is that they don't constrain your project. This is good for codenames, but for some reason, today codenames turn into official names (maybe because of "release early, release often" philosophy?).

EDIT: My pet peeve, though, is names that mean something unrelated and much cooler. Like (my go-to example) Terraform - glorified configuration manager appropriating the name of something infinitely more interesting.

danellis3• 9 years ago

Terraform is a great name, though, because it describes, through metaphor, what it actually does.

FiatLuxDave• 9 years ago

This is my pet peeve too. Speaking as a physicist, if I ever invent a Quantum Fusion Plasma Turbine Terraformer, I'm totally going to name it the Visual Java Rusty Lispy Scripter Plus Plus. I figure that might pollute the namespace for programmers enough to show them what they do to other fields. Revenge!

zitterbewegung• 9 years ago

Microsoft does this with their products like SQL Server. Which is confusing and can cause name collisions . Due to their dominance it’s not hard to search for but smaller products would have that problem .

atonse• 9 years ago

Depending on what you're googling for, it usually provides enough context to know the phrase means the MS server.

Plus, even in colloquial language, we don't ever call a database server an SQL server. They're referred to as databases, or by their names.

dhd415• 9 years ago

That may be the case for other products, but in this case, they acquired the "Sybase SQL Server" product and simply renamed it "Microsoft SQL Server".

mschaef• 9 years ago

Or they could just do s/Apache/Holy/

reboog711• 9 years ago

From a purely legal and promotional standpoint, Guacamole is more likely to be trademarkable than "Apache Clientless Remote Desktop Gateway".

I prefer descriptive names too.

cageface• 9 years ago

Why does this have to be the top comment? HN is so disappointing sometimes.

Raphmedia• 9 years ago

It's not as if Amazon way of naming things is any better even if they use buzzwords instead of cute words : https://imgur.com/k013j1R

songshu• 9 years ago

It really helps to have a Googleable name. You will get adopted faster and your community will grow if people are able to Google "enable 24 bit color Guacamole" rather than the generic alternative. Also generic language simply can't represent the sheer variety we have, or explain what projects do to newcomers who don't understand the generic language anyway.

geodel2• 9 years ago

Well this seems one of the million open source Java project from Apache. At one point names were straightforward like 'commons-cli', 'commons-httpclient', 'stringutils' etc and libraries useful for large number of programmers. But nowadays it is mostly half-assed 'frameworks' with fancy name.

AsyncAwait• 9 years ago

It's a product/marketing thing. "Apache clientless remote desktop gateway" sounds nowhere near as interesting as "Apache Guacamole".

sillysaurus3• 9 years ago

Well, yeah. But that's just another name for clickbait, which people generally agree is a bad thing.

mikeash3• 9 years ago

There's a reason why naming is called out as one of only two truly difficult problems in programming. (The others being cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.)

Myrmornis2• 9 years ago

A reason which you appear to have forgotten to include in your post.

Goladus• 9 years ago

I'd very much prefer if the named Guacamole the "Apache clientless remote desktop gateway"

I don't like either one. "clientless remote desktop gateway" is way too long and cumbersome. But it seems like, recognizing that, the answer was $(shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words), resulting in a generic commonplace word with no relationship to the project at all.

daveheq• 9 years ago

Just wait, when the only technology will be Clientless Serverless Stateless Dataless Interfaceless Codeless Gateway, it'll be called Cornucopia.

julianj• 9 years ago

I get your point, but I believe the name Guacamole existed before the Apache incubation.

linsomniac2• 9 years ago

This reminds me of a client that hired a new IT director and his first order of business was renaming all the machines from their boring names.

We had things like database servers named "db1" and "db2", load balancers were "haproxy1" and "haproxy2", web servers "web1" through "web8", that sort of thing.

The new IT director decided to name servers based on city names, where the country indicated the type (Sweden is database servers, Finland is load balancer, Japan is web servers). And these weren't obvious names, ISTR that one of the 20 names I had heard before.

So at 3am when an alert came in saying "Hagfors has high load", you had to know that was in Sweden to know it was one of the database servers. But was it the primary or the secondary?

It seemed a curious decision to make.

technofiend• 9 years ago

Back when Shell's design pattern required a master NFS server per work group whoever got the money to buy their server got to pick the naming convention. Since most of the servers where I worked were for geologists we ended up with servers named scungilli and murex and lots of really long names that required aliases. And unless you knew your biology classifications very well there was no reason to know which server went with which client.

whistlerbrk• 9 years ago

That seems like a curious hire to make.

philrw• 9 years ago

The conference rooms in my office are named for local cities and towns, many of which are nearby. We have a conference room named for the city that our office is in. In my foolish engineer mind, "we're meeting in Northeast 2-A" would make more sense than "we're meeting in Whoville."

And all the printers have names of cartoon characters.

Thank goodness we have a searchable indoor map.

zwerdlds• 9 years ago

Let a thousand 'Markup Language's bloom.

swypych• 9 years ago

They are trying to create a brand, something catchy that will be remembered. "Apache clientless remote desktop gateway" just does not have the same ring to it.

yebyen• 9 years ago

Apache Guacamole is at least 1000 days old, according to the top comment on this post which was made 500 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744430

gressquel• 9 years ago

Citrix has a html5 client. I think it just transfers png files

danellis3• 9 years ago

Is it Apache Guacamole because it was a holey guacamole?

mxuribe• 9 years ago

Yeah, TeamViewer is certainly decent enough, but I'm always looking for other open source remote desktop access mechanisms (especially now that my current day job is pretty restrictive with the laptops they issue us). I had never heard of this Apache Guacamole, but will certainly give it a try!

SadWebDeveloper• 9 years ago

Are we going back to dumb-machines (aka Thin Clients)? Seems like half the comments here are for people working entirely "on the cloud".

intrasight• 9 years ago

I wouldn't say "going back" - the smart crowd never left them ;)

daddykotex• 9 years ago

Here is an interview at Software Engineering Daily with Mike Jumper: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/06/27/apache-guaca...

sp3322• 9 years ago

Can you copy and paste text out of it? Can you drag & drop files into it? Can you print to a local printer from the remote session?

Rickasaurus• 9 years ago

Can you control all of these things with permissioning via an auth server of some kind?

jasonellis• 9 years ago

Yes on copy and paste, though you have to use a text box in the browser window (a menu on the left side) to mess with the clipboard. It's not ideal, but it's possible.

I cannot remember drag & drop files off the top of my head, but I seem to think no.

Not sure about local printer.

DrPhish• 9 years ago

Printing is enabled by they system generating PDFs that the browser automatically downloads. It actually works pretty slick.

File drag-and-drop can be set up via a couple of different mechanisms, and isn't easy to get going, but works fine once you have it going.

joncrane• 9 years ago

How well does it scale to many simultaneous users?

I am using this for a side project. We have training classes where sometimes 10-20 students connect to Windows servers using RDP.

At times we get a weird key sticking/lagging bug. We haven't figured out how to fix it; we think it's a JVM memory issue but we're not sure.

shiftpgdn2• 9 years ago

I want to throw in a thumbs up for Guacamole. I deployed it two years ago to allow us to demo our software for big enterprise clients who can't easily install things on their office computers. I can rapidly deploy an Azure Server 2012 VM set to kiosk mode with our software installed in under a minute.

Enterprise clients can then login from anywhere and get a fast controlled demo of our software.

A few months ago I also threw out our crappy old Citrix deployment and replaced it with Guacamole. When hurricane Harvey hit we had 50+ engineers working remotely without a single hiccup. It was a lifesaver.

voidmain00013• 9 years ago

If your environment is MS Win, may I please have more detail on how you threw out Citrix. Guacamole is not providing multiple sessions to a single computer, rather that's the functionality of a broker such as Microsoft Terminal Server (termdd.sys) which allows for multiple sessions connected to the console of a computer, likewise for Citrix. For your 50+ engineers to work remotely, they would have had to have been connected to 50 unique computers via the Guacamole Server, or you still have a Citrix server and Guacamole has replaced the Citrix ICA client...

[The web application deployed to the Guacamole server reads the Guacamole protocol and forwards it to guacd, the native Guacamole proxy. This proxy actually interprets the contents of the Guacamole protocol, connecting to any number of remote desktop servers on behalf of the user.|https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/doc/gug/guacamole-arc...]

shiftpgdn2• 9 years ago

Our Citrix deployment was ONLY connection brokering. Engineers here work on 12-40 core desktops with 64-256GB of local ram. Unfortunately the workload isn't suited for VDI.

faragon• 9 years ago

Guacamole is "clientless" at following cost:

("SS": Session Server (where the session is running), "GS": Gateway Server (where the protocol translation is performed from RDP -or VNC- to custom HTML5), "WC": web client)

- At SS, compress images using the RDP -or VNC- protocol. Cost: CPU, RAM, and RAM bandwidth, because of desktop render, delta analyzer, image compression for the RDP -or VNC- protocol, image-specific compression (e.g. RLE in if a old protocol is negotiated), lossless compression ("bulk"), encapsulation, bandwidth/frame control, transfer.

- TCP transport between the SS and the GS. Cost: LAN traffic.

- At GS, decompress the RDP -or VNC- protocol in the "gateway" server (bulk lossless decompressor, and image decompressor -e.g. RLE for basic protocol negotiation-). Cost: mainly CPU.

- At GS, compress the the images in a format suitable for the web client. Cost: mainly CPU.

- Send the images via websocket from the GS to the WC. Cost: WAN traffic.

- Decompress and render the images in the web client. Cost: client CPU and RAM.

Then, you have to dimension how many GS you need per SS, routing between the WAN the GS, how do you balance both the SS and the GS, high availability setup, etc.

TL;DR: data is compressed and decompressed twice, because of the protocol conversion, involving extra latency because of more time for compression/decompression and more hops.

z3t4• 9 years ago

For VNC there's https://github.com/novnc/noVNC

geonnave• 9 years ago

The video demo of this tool is fantastic! It is a simple "showing by doing", that also gives a show while showing (pun kind of intended).

placeybordeaux• 9 years ago

Wow the install looks like a pain in the ass.

kisstheblade2• 9 years ago

It wasn't difficult, two dockers and a mysql db. Unfortunately it didn't actually work, the vnc lib segfaulted.

Just use nomachine, it's worth it. Clients for all os:es.

kisstheblade2• 9 years ago

Tested this, installed the docker versions (which should "just work"). The vnc library segfaulted immediately, didn't work. How can this fail even if they have built docker images with presumably the correct libraries?

niutech6• 9 years ago

Older thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8166388

Guacamole – A clientless remote desktop gateway

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