Re-attaching to GUI apps a la XP? (was Re: [plug] grabbing running apps)

[Peter Wright]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 09:25:20AM +0800, Christian wrote:
[ ... ]
> I recently read about a feature in Windows XP that allows you to log in,
> run a GUI app, log out and have the app continue running in the
> background until the next time you log back in when you can continue
> using it.

Well I don't know about MS Windows XP, but we use MS Windows 2000 Server
for virtually all our development machines at my working environment and I
Just The Other Day(tm) had it demonstrated to me that this sort of thing
can be done, very very effectively in fact.

Windows Terminal Services. You can basically connect to machine A from
machine B, log in and start doing stuff. This is effectively inside a
display window, much like VNC, but it's much slicker and quicker than VNC
(much like comparing X11 remote displays to VNC). You can even fullscreen
this window and do stuff from machine B just as though you were inside
machine A.

While you are doing stuff from machine B, other people can be using machine
A (either remotely or locally) at the same time as you, doing completely
different stuff. Effectively just like the sort of thing X11 has done for
years :), and it does feel sort of weird having it for MS Windows.

There is one particular advantage over X11, though, and that it that you
can disconnect your "remote desktop" connection and reconnect at a later
date and (assuming machine A has not been rebooted in the interim ;) all
your apps will have been running and your environment should be pretty much
"just as you left it". So it can do the same as VNC in that respect -
however, VNC does not enable you to log in and it does not enable you to
have separate user sessions concurrently on one machine.

It's really not bad at all. VNC combined with X11 combined with ssh and
screen on Unix machines is probably the closest approximation on Unix/Linux
to this kind of effect, as an X11 connection can't just be severed and
restored without killing the apps using the remote display.

Well, I'm probably going to be using WTS quite a bit at my work in the near
future, as we're just in the process of receiving about seven new
megabeastie machines (all dual-proc except for one quad-proc) that I'll be
managing a lot of big-arse stress testing (for our application suite) on.
And while there have been seven new boxes ordered, a grand total of zero
(0) new monitors have been ordered to go with them. I think there's a
none-too-subtle message from management there - no, these are _not_ going
to be workstation substitute machines (dammit! *grin*).

Ooooh, new toys - and a couple of them at least will be RHLinux/Oracle
servers, so it's not all Windows. ;-)

Pete.
-- 
http://akira.apana.org.au/~pete/

-- 
Futility Factor: No experiment is ever a complete failure - it can always
serve as a negative example.