[Gllug] Windows management using OSS (was: is this a big problem?)

[Russell Howe]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 12:17:48PM +0100, Jim Bailey wrote:
> On Aug 26, 08:04, Matthew Thompson wrote:
> > 
> > On 25 Aug 2005, at 23:09, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> > 
> > >You can reduce costs substantially by using Linux/BSD on the servers.
> > >Samba as a fileserver can remove the need for Windows CALs, and makes
> > >sense. You can get a good AD equivalent with Samba 3 and OpenLDAP,
> > >without too much hassle.

I'd expect a mix of Unattended for installation
(http://unattended.sf.net/) and something like wpkg (http://www.wpkg.org
IIRC) for software deployment should work fairly well.

Add in VNC and perhaps even Cygwin ssh for remote admin and you should
be good to go, pretty much.

Admittedly, VNC isn't anywhere near as bandwidth efficient or as
responsive as an RDP client like rdesktop...

VNC's option to have either the server or client side open a listening
socket is killer though.

Person you want to control is behind NAT? No problem, just set your
viewer to listen mode (xvncviewer -listen) and get them to "add new
client" and connect you up.

This also has the advantage that you don't have a listening VNC server
on every single user desktop (which, frankly, I find a scary prospect,
no matter what password you set). If you always admin machines by
getting the user to connect to you, then you can untick the "Accept
socket connections" checkbox on the VNC server configuration and it
won't open a listening socket.

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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