Apache Guacamole: a clientless remote desktop gateway | Hacker News Reader

Apache Guacamole: a clientless remote desktop gateway

guacamole.apache.org

215 pointsthunderbong50 comments

I love Guacamole (the food too). I use the software pretty much every day, and have been pretty happy with it. My two main gripes are 1) it doesn't auto focus login/password fields, and 2) if the engine can't keep up with what's displaying on the remote screen, like if a video autoplays, it introduces an enormous amount of input lag, or even drops input events altogether. It makes getting out of that situation rather difficult.

These are difficult problems and perhaps the modern web has developed at a pace that older tech like RDP has not kept pace with. But Guacamole bucks that trend.

Guacamole is good, and I love that it's clientles and works in the browsers, but VNC lacks sound so you need to do that separately. Also the input lag when remote frames increase in frequency is challenging.

If you're looking for something lighter weight and possibly smoother and faster (albeit non-free software with a non-commercial option), check out BrowserBox: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

Solving input lag, and maintaining responsiveness across a range of bandwidth situations has been one of our priorities and I think we've mostly achieved.

We've accomplished this through a combination of sensible heuristics for congestion control, and using WebRTC with a fallback to WebSockets when faster. We also have audio out of the box, no set up required!

However there's always room to improve, which is why it makes it so exciting to work on. Depending on how close you are to a server you may encounter lag issues, too.

Right now you can play with a free live demo of BrowserBox here (sorry, signup is not supported yet!):

https://browse.cloudtabs.net/signupless_session

Some other problems we solve that are not always so easy to configure with Guacamole (and are harder to do with an RDP layer in general), but much easier for us as we virtualize the browser itself are first class mobile support.

Obviously that's an issue with remoting desktops from small form devices in general, but if a browser is all you need remotely then we got your back! :)

Same time, BrowserBox will not be for everyone. It all depends on what you need. Get on touch if you are interested!

rdp is one of the few solutions that works ok enough. I tried pretty much all the protocols there are and rdp was either the smoothest to work with, or had the only good client software for windows

I agree! It's good enough and survives. We also aim to be "good enough" at DOSYAGO/BrowserBox/CloudTabs but for a slightly different niche: rather than desktop virtualization, we do Browser virtualization and all that entails! :)

Several years back, I developed an education platform using Apache Guacamole for a startup. Its robust functionality and high level of customization made it an exceptional choice. I can only imagine how much more powerful it has become since then. Kudos to the devs for their invaluable contribution to the OSS community.

I did the same thing actually. There must be dozens of us! I was continually impressed by how easily and reliably it worked.

Apache Guacamole - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29442643 - Dec 2021 (116 comments)

How to sell open source software: Guacamole case study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624340 - June 2020 (29 comments)

Apache Guacamole 1.1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190251 - Jan 2020 (50 comments)

Apache Guacamole – Clientless remote desktop gateway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660925 - Nov 2019 (40 comments)

Apache Guacamole – A clientless remote desktop gateway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15778902 - Nov 2017 (41 comments)

Guacamole – A clientless remote desktop gateway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15389727 - Oct 2017 (216 comments)

Apache Guacamole - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744430 - May 2016 (57 comments)

Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8166388 - Aug 2014 (78 comments)

Guacamole is an HTML5 + JavaScript (AJAX) viewer for VNC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1503837 - July 2010 (11 comments)

We've been using Guacamole everywhere after OpenText EOLed Exceed OnDemand and tried to charge way too much for their replacement, FastX. The little bastards even demanded to know what our internal architecture was before they would give us a demo copy to test.

We told them politely where to stick it. Ever since then, we've been using Guacamole everywhere and even created an extension called CHIPS. The developer had a good sense of humor for that.

I use xpra for similar purposes (https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/)

> Xpra is known as "screen for X" : its seamless mode allows you to run X11 programs, usually on a remote host, direct their display to your local machine, and then to disconnect from these programs and reconnect from the same or another machine(s), without losing any state. Effectively giving you remote access to individual graphical applications. It can also be used to access existing desktop sessions and start remote desktop sessions.

What a spectacular demo video. The music is on point.

It's on the homepage, and here are direct Vimeo links:

https://guacamole.apache.org/

https://vimeo.com/116207678

https://player.vimeo.com/video/116207678?title=0&byline=0&po...

Interesting that vimeo says that video is from 9 years ago! I can't wait to see a Guac demo today!

My previous workplace used Guacamole, it was pretty good. We used it for both SSH (Linux) and RDP (Windows).

My biggest annoyance was trying to break my habit of using ^W to backspace words in bash because it would close the tab in Firefox.

Does anyone know how to tell a browser to pass through Ctrl-W ?

Would also save me a lot of closed tabs :)

Probably clone the repo and comment it out?

It took years of practice but I've made my brain accept Ctrl+Backspace in browser contexts.

Chrome's console : Refused to frame 'https://player.vimeo.com/' because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: "frame-src 'self'".

Until the CSP is fixed, you can view it here: https://player.vimeo.com/video/116207678

that chrome - erm - chrome is such a throwback

Their website had just recently gotten a make over, which might be why this was posted.

https://github.com/apache/guacamole-website/pull/138

Great project

I've been looking for an alternative that doesn't need a Java back-end, mostly because I've found that the proxy tends to balloon up with multiple simultaneous connections. In fact, there seems to be a lack of modern web-based RDP client alternatives in general.

Years ago I ported some of the Java to Go because we didn't need any of what the Java client was doing:

https://github.com/wwt/guac

Yeah, I have that on my favorites, and the sample Vue app. Never found something that worked beyond a demo scenario.

There's https://rustdesk.com

I need something that doesn’t reinvent the RDP wheel with less features — i.e., I need real, live RDP connections to existing servers, not a new piece of software to do remote desktops with a different line protocol.

Try KasmWeb[0].

[0] https://kasmweb.com/

I use KasmVNC with some container apps that bundle it, but that doesn’t really match RDP’s feature set.

Have you setup the Kasm Server aspect[0]. That is, not just the container workspace, but you can have Kasm connect to a separate actual server via RDP, or VNC; not a docker container workspace. In this manner, Kasm has completely replaced Guacamole for me.

[0] https://kasmweb.com/docs/latest/guide/workspaces.html#server...

https://github.com/Ylianst/MeshCentral

Nope. Why would I want an extra agent on each target machine?

BrowserBox uses a lightweight Node async event loop backend and runs across Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS/Kali/MacOS and even Windows Server is supported via our PSGallery link.

Rather than being an RDP or VNC clone, it just virtualizes the remote browser.

BrowserBox is source-available, free for non-commercial (including government/non-profit) use and comes with audio, mobile first, file uploads/downloads and so on out of the box!

Try a free demo right now (sorry signups are not open yet!):

https://browse.cloudtabs.net/signupless_session

Nope. Doesn’t work for any real Remote Desktop use case.

Not even for the browser?

What's your use case and what do you currently use?

I need to access RDP servers, period. Web apps are not even a consideration in many environments.

That’s true, I understand. I’m sure it seemed like I was suggesting it could replace RDP entirely. I’m sorry for not being more clear.

Curious tho, what’s the issue with current solutions? Windows RDP? Guac? Sounds like you’re saying they’re no good?

Windows RDP is what I need to use, but I also need a lightweight web bastion. Guacamole works, but is too heavy for the kind of proxy/router/equipment I’m targeting.

Ah, I understand. Do you need GUI for that router stuff can’t just use SSH? What about xtightvnc with novnc web fronted?

No, I need to access legacy applications that have no web versions. You do realize that there is more to computers than the Internet and web development? :)

Man I was playin with computers before the internet, so...I guess I do. Do you? Hahaha! :) You know if you use novnc from the web you can connect to a non web application, right? Your use case is not elucidated very cleary. Maybe you can try....being more clear? Hahaha! :)

I set this up to provide RDP access to 10 Ubuntu lxde VM's that we used for students on a training course. It worked very well in the browser for the most part, but isn't yet quite as smooth as using Microsoft Remote Desktop client. Very impressive though :-)

What were you using for RDP server on Ubuntu? was it xrdp?

At Teleport we had a lot of requests to support Windows / RDP. We ended up building our own Go/Rust Client into our server/web client. This gave more control over the RDP protocol and authentication.

https://goteleport.com/blog/desktop-access/ https://goteleport.com/blog/secure-rdp-client/

Guacamole has supported windows RDP for at least eight years now. (Probably longer, I started using it in 2016 and it had support already)

Is there a similar project that is NOT java?

Why?

There are some people talking about some over in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39869246

Guacamole was great back when I discovered it and I've used it extensively. I've since replaced it with KasmWeb, and it's much smoother and a better experience. No Java either.

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