Graphical Console Beta | Hacker News Reader

Graphical Console Beta

forum.linode.com

49 pointsneetuser23 comments

I'm a new dev at Linode, and this is the first product I helped ship. It was very fun to work on - we used Node to write all of the glue that gets noVNC to talk to qemu behind the scenes. LMK if you have questions, I can probably answer them.

Is any of the work open source? I'm also a node/js dev and this sounds like a project I would be interested in.

I sent some fixes up to noVNC (along with the colleagues that worked on Glish with me), but our node work is closed source and will remain so since it deals with some internal things like authentication. However, we have some pretty cool open source projects in the pipeline for the coming weeks/months/years/decades.

Pretty cool. I did a similar integration back in 2011 for a VPS provider when we shipped Windows. I ended up writing an auth provider for noVNC proxy though that verified a token passed in against a new endpoint in our API(with a bunch of security checks and expiry of course). Worked pretty well after cleaning up the proxy a bit(particularly the logging). I'm guessing Linode needs to handle a bit more load than we did of course :)

This is pretty cool. However, outside of abnormal OS installations or something crazy like that, what is the actual use for this?

I actually really like Linode, and am worried the direction of this comment thread is going to be "Great, a frivolous feature probably containing a bunch of security vulnerabilities." Yes, Linode has made some mistakes in the past with security. But let's try to stay on topic today.

How is this innovation? Am I missing something?

Graphical consoles have existed for just about every other hypervisor since... well, I've been virtualizing since ESX 3.5 days and even it had a graphical guest console.

(Title and link have been changed - original was "Linode Really Innovates")

Good point. I guess because it's in-browser? Would somebody who has tried it report on responsiveness and whether it's HTML5 or Flash?

Even in-browser consoles have been done for a long time. At least Digital Ocean and Ubiquity Hosting have... how else do you fix a broken firewall rule that blocks SSH or something?

Linode has had a textmode in-browser console for quite some time (LISH). This post is introducing GLISH:

> It's similar to Lish, except instead of connecting to your Linode's serial port and being text, Glish connects to your Linode's graphics port and displays, you guessed it, raster graphics.

Oh yea, I mean Linode's had the out-of-band in-browser console since at least 2009 when I first became a customer. Are DO and Ubiquity's consoles graphical, too? If that's the case then I agree this is catching up, not innovation.

Ubiquity's did, although I never had a reason to run a GUI on any of my DO instances -- however I don't see why they wouldn't -- all these "graphical" consoles just use VNC to project the GUI into the browser.

I suspect there hasn't been much demand for Linode to integrate a full graphical console, but it's been on their checklist for some time and are now getting around to it. Could be a sign of polishing up the platform, which I'm sure is good for all Linode users in general.

We use twisted-vncauthproxy[1] to open a noVNC console from the UI to speak with the VNC port that each KVM is running on. Before that we used a Java applet with a similar vnc proxy software.

[1]https://code.osuosl.org/projects/twisted-vncauthproxy

This sounds really cool. Unfortunately I can't test it out yet, as all of my Linodes appear to be the older Xen based ones. Migrating one now, just so I can see what all of the fuss is about...

Cool, but honestly, I'm not sure I'd ever use it.

It's great for people who might be more comfortable with a GUI than CLI, but yeah, I have no real use for it.

This is neat.

I'm still patiently waiting for the ability to push compressed disk images via API so I don't have to boot finix to do it. :-)

Do you have demo video or screencasting for this? Looks interesting..

This could be a good time to upgrade that responsive design http://i.imgur.com/2SHWxc9.png

They just need a new Forum Software.

It's just noVNC connecting to qemu. This is a pretty standard feature, it's just gluing together a couple pieces of open source software.

Another example of merely "gluing together a couple of pieces of open source software":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Cool reference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com