Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop | Hacker News Reader

Guacamole – HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop

guac-dev.org

383 pointstux196878 comments

I run Guacamole on my home network as an RDP client to my Windows and Linux boxes. It's a fantastic piece of software. It beats VMC widely in terms of speed, and RDP narrowly when used across the internet. I run guacd on my home server and use that to access my interior network from any computer. It's stable, consumes low memory, and works nicely over HTTPS with apache reverse-proxying the Java webapp. A+ amaze your friends type of software. I am a huge guacamole fanboy.

Edit: I used a Linux VM on my home windows box over guacamole from a Chromebook as my primary mobile computer for 6 months. Browsing in Firefox on my remote VM was always faster than browsing the web locally on the Chromebook. If only it worked well on tablets...

> and RDP narrowly

I don't suppose[1] it supports RDP 8's new ability to play video on a remote desktop by streaming the media across and decoding it locally (works in the Win/Mac official clients).

I was amazed and dumbfounded the first time a YouTube video played in a remote session with perfectly in-sync audio and video and instant response to mouse clicks and now find it hard to go back...

[1]: Can't test this myself until I get back to a desktop computer (this is from a phone).

RDP8 also supports RDP over UDP which further enhances performance in high-latency scenarios. I'm assuming that is also not factored into that claim either

I kept waiting for the demo video to show any streaming video which they kept avoiding. VNC is ancient by industry standards. While this is convenient and the open license is helpful, there are far more mature remote desktop protocol stacks available commercially. PCoIP, RDP8, ICA/HDX, heck even HP's RGS cam handle streaming video and USB remoting.

In early 2013, guacamole would do video for a little bit, and then get desynchronized from the server. It would be pretty great while it lasted though...

WebRTC tries UDP before falling back to HTTP/S. I'm betting guac will be even faster when they move to that from websockets.

I haven't seen any solid implementations of client<->server communication with webrtc compared to websocket, though - but I haven't looked very hard.

While guacamole doesn't support video encoding and streaming itself, it's still fast enough to watch 480p-sized videos on LAN at 30fps, along with forwarded sound. Tested streaming from a Windows 8 desktop to a Core 2 Linux laptop running Chrome.

I highly doubt it's better than an optimized protocol like RDP...

There already have been a few nice VNC web clients around for a few years, like NoVNC (http://kanaka.github.io/noVNC/, python server-side, used in Openstack and others). Unfortunately, there's no magic: you need your VNC/RDP server, then your "clientless server" (proxy socket<->websocket or alike), then your web server to host the "clientless" client.

It's becoming to be interesting when your VNC/RDP client directly supports websocket, eliminating the need of a proxy and only use a STATIC web server to host client. Wait, it's built-in for qemu since 1.4! http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=commit;h=0057a0d59006d00c2...

Do you mean websockets or webrtc? This is a use case for the latter :)

Agreed! Current implementations (even this one I suppose, althought I didn't have the time to check) use either websocket or older hacks like client-polling or Flash sockets. Time to enter to the future! :)

Note that 1.4 introduced websockets support, VNC support was present much long ago. You would need a proxy tho, like the one NoVNC provides.

I am still waiting better support for Clipboard on QEMU. :/

Currently using NoVNC as a client. Works really well. Keyboard needs more love.

The websocket support in QEMU allows you to connect with noVNC directly without using a websockify (proxy/bridge). You can still choose to connect to the regular VNC port using the proxy, but if you activate websockets then you can connect without it. The same is true now with libvncserver based VNC servers (e.g. x11vnc)

Guacamole and NoVNC are very different conceptually. NoVNC is a client for the VNC protocol that runs in your browser, and a dumb TCP-to-Websockets proxy script that you run on your server if your VNC software doesn't already support Websockets in addition to TCP. Your browser and the server still communicate using the VNC protocol, and you'll get performance no better than TCP VNC (bad performance over the internet, in my opinion).

Guacamole has much better performance. Your browser and the guacamole server communicate using a custom, better-performing protocol (http://guac-dev.org/doc/gug/protocol-reference.html). While guacamole can still connect to your server with VNC, it also supports RDP, which is also faster. Even when using Guacamole as a proxy for VNC if your guacd and VNC servers are on LAN together, because the guacamole protocol works much better over high latency connections than VNC does.

Edit: also, Guacamole doesn't use Websockets, which makes it much easier to proxy with your standard HTTP proxy software like apache, which didn't get a Websockets proxy module until 2.4 (Ubuntu 12.04 is 2.2).

"Guacamole has much better performance ... custom, better-performing protocol" -> What aspect of performance? Latency? Bandwidth? Server CPU and memory usage? Scaling? Do you have some actual performance benchmarks comparing the two? And does guacamole perform better when connecting to the same VNC server or is that comparing VNC server with an RDP server. RDP itself is a newer, more complex and more efficient protocol than VNC but VNC is supported pretty much everywhere. RDP could pretty easily be implemented in noVNC by somebody with the time (in fact it's been on the aspirational feature list for years).

With noVNC the protocol decode/encode is done in the browser (modern browsers are plenty fast enough to do this easily), whereas with Guacamole the burden of decode/encode for every client happens on the server where the proxy/client part is running. Even if you need to run websockify to proxy/bridge noVNC, the only thing it is doing is shuttling network traffic and the python implementation of websockify can easily handle lots of simultaneous clients without breaking a sweat.

noVNC was designed with Infrastructure as a Server (IaaS) providers in mind so minimizing server CPU, memory and bandwidth was a goal in the design.

Also, guacamole does use websockets when it is available.

I agree lets be careful about stating better performance unless you can post some stats. It may be true but I'm an engineer and like to see why 1 vs the other. Guacamole is either going to use VNC or RDP protocols. Both are relatively known quantities. I have used Guacamole on Ubuntu 14.04 desktop servers to provide HTML5 access to LXC (linux container based) Ubuntu remote desktops. That requires some configuration w/x11rdp and xfreerdp etc but there is a freakin great toolset with the odd name of "ScaryGliders" http://scarygliders.net/2012/05/23/the-scarygliders-x11rdp-o...

that hss the build down to an art. They GIT the latest code, do the required build and then install for you on your system. After that you just install Guacamole server side and you are done.

Nomachine also has been doing this for a while, and NX is really darn smooth on spotty connections: https://www.nomachine.com/node/2473

I do love that this is open source though. Someone will probably add NX support soon. Sound support also looks pretty impressive.

I've found remote desktop setup immensely frustrating in the past. Every six months or so I'll think "Wouldn't it be cool if it I could have an Ubuntu AMI on EC2 I could boot and remote desktop into?" Then it's hours of googling and config settings editing. Hopefully someone will point me to the easy way I've been missing?

Chrome remote desktop works with linux/mac/win now. Not sure if there is some headless way to set it up on EC2 and/or linux but I've got it running on my box at home and it works great.

Unfortunately RDP server on Linux is a bit tricky to set up, and involved some amount of compiling for me. On the other hand, I think `x11vnc` is pretty easy to get started with. I followed this guide, and it worked for me no problem: http://askubuntu.com/questions/229989/how-to-setup-x11vnc-to...

My guacamole server then connects to x11vnc so I still get RDP-like performance across the internet.

Edit: you'll also want to make an Upstart job for x11vnc so that it starts on boot, and restarts if (when) it dies. You can just copy any of the basic upstart jobs in /etc/init.d/*.conf and investigate. You also may want to make x11vnc start after your X server: http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#run-a-job-before-another...

There is a lot of fiddly business :/

Did you check out freerdp? I believe its in most package managers.

Freerdp's server component is pretty experimental and mostly undocumented. The freerdp package you're referring to is a RDP client, not a server. This was the best result I got for googling "freerdp server": http://askubuntu.com/questions/475776/can-freerdp-be-used-as...

Very much still a compile-it-yourself experience. When I was setting up my RDP server on my Mint media center, I went with xrdp + x11rdp setup detailed in some guides at ScaryGliders.net, although the same guy as released a bunch of scripts to do it for you, see https://github.com/scarygliders/X11RDP-o-Matic

I don't really want to deal with recompiling stuff and manual updates though, and expect others to feel the same, which is why I advocated x11vnc to the GP.

https://github.com/rogaha/docker-desktop

Having an HTML5 client built-in doesn't mean that it's "clientless" but it's still impressive. MIT license doesn't hurt, too.

It's "clientless" as in you don't have to install any software on the machine you want to connect from. No need to fiddle with RDP software on your parent's computers, or worry about access control restrictions from a locked-down corporate network. As far as permissions go, if you can browse the internet on a computer, you can remote control your servers with Guacamole.

While purely a semantic argument, perhaps "plugin-free" is a more meaningful description than "clientless"

> It's "clientless" as in you don't have to install any software on the machine you want to connect from.

Except a browser compatible with HTML5-august-2014-revision. Believe it or not, there are many places stuck in pre-HTML5 times (hotel computers, for example).

If it could stream GIFs and accept clicks with server-side image maps, then it would be compatible with every desktop graphical browser in existence (Opera Mini and text browser would still be not enough).

> If it could stream GIFs and accept clicks with server-side image maps, then it would be compatible with every desktop graphical browser in existence

I can't decide if that's the most brilliant idea I've ever heard or the most terrifying. Probably both.

LogMeIn did this (albeit with refreshing static images for control, IIRC) as a supported in-browser fallback client for almost a decade. It was horrifically painful, but usable in a pinch.

You could always install a older version, this has been around for roughly 2 years now.

I see a lot of these front pages with "major bummer, this video can't be played with your setup". Feels like the era of Flash all over again.

I don't understand, It seems HTML5 video to me. What kind of setup do you have?

Firefox on Ubuntu. It's probably <video> using a non-free codec (H.264).

It is, but I'm using Firefox on Arch Linux and it works fine for me. H.264 has been supported in Firefox on Linux for a few versions now, although you need gstreamer installed with the relevant plugins.

Hey I'm on firefox (latest -31) on arch as well. Thing is vimeo doesn't load for me either. I do have the packages `gstreamer0.10` and `gstreamer0.10-base` installed, however in `about:plugins` in firefox, there are no plugins installed. So does this mean I have to have some such 'plugin' here for h264 to work?

Kinda. You need H.264 codec support in Gstreamer. Try installing the Gstreamer libav (an FFMPEG fork) plugin: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?name=gst-libav

That should give your Gstreamer support for all formats libav supports.

Oh my I feel silly now, the package you linked is listed right in the optional deps for firefox! (Along with `gst-plugins-good` for h264 video too).

I remember being surprised that sites like dailymotion and vimeo still wouldn't work since I expected firefox to come with h264 support a while back (the whole cisco thing if I remember correctly). Always just attributed it to not having flash installed or whatever and shrugged my shoulders.

Anyways they work now, and at http://www.youtube.com/html5 it showed no h264 support before, but now it does. So thanks for the comment, without which I would have still been living in the dark. :)

Not every browser supports the latest version of the HTML5 plug-in.

I have used Guacamole as a solution to supporting remote desktop when the client location's firewall(s) allow nothing except port 80 and 443. Worked perfectly allowing users to connect to multiple desktops with no installation what so ever. Simply the perfect tool for what we needed and setup is a breeze once you familiarize yourself with the documentation.

Definitely keeping this in my mental toolbox!

Looks promising! Could be use to control bittorrent server from work. Maybe call it pluginless instead? Clientless kinda makes me imagine it's pure js/html5 app but actually it uses a server as client.

you can already control rtorrent via ssh, though admittedly it has a steeper learning curve.

For a less steep learning curve I recommend Deluge's WebUI.

Another option could be transmission daemon web ui (forwarded over ssh)

Or setup a web interface for rtorrent: http://wiki.rtorrent.org/RtorrentProjects#Web_Frontends

And on Android, there's Transdroid: http://www.transdroid.org/

Can I use this for a setup where multiple users look at the same "screen"? I combed through the documentation and am attempted to say no...

That sort of setup need to be handled by your VNC or RDP server itself. Guacamole will play nice with whatever your target server is doing in that regard.

I wonder if this can be used to set up a multi-headed workstation environment, where each user has their own desktop (Linux) on the same large, megalithic server? I have a machine with 128gigs of RAM and 1TB of SSD .. this seems like the perfect situation where I can give a desktop to 3 or 4 users on the same machine. Anyone know how well that works with Guacamole yet?

It doesn't seem like a particularly elegant solution, but with that much memory, you could almost certainly carve out 4 VMs, each running a separate guac instance, right? Getting to them might be trickier, though...

You don't need a separate Guacamole application instance for each user or even each VNC/RDP host -- each user in your Guacamole config has its own connection settings and operates independently of other sessions.

I've since gone through the setup of Guacamole and tried things out - indeed, its as you state, you can isolate users pretty well. I was able to set up 3 test users, each with their own WM, and independent logins on the machine .. and it works pretty well. I can see this as being a great facility for a small-office environment that just wants to run a single machine that services multiple users, each logging in with Android tablets or whatever other cheap browser-supporting devices they may have .. pretty neat, and you can't beat the ease of deployment: just point your users at their web URL, and there's their Linux desktop.

(I was even able to run Inkscape and Ardour on different logins, without too much fuss .. worked quite well!)

I had struggles when using my iPad with Guacamole, but it works great with Chromebooks/Chromeboxes!

Mmph, have done this with XenServer (can just self-built OSS) and just standard RDP clients for the short while I had access to a machine about that powerful. That worked beautifully and gave me (yes, just me :P) a bunch of very practical isolated environments on which I concurrently ran various heavy workloads (and one as my 'standard desktop' on which I watched YouTube videos whilst waiting for things :P).

I only use Linux/OSX for local machines, but RDP was substantially more responsive than any VNC server I could get my hands on (including RealVNC Enterprise).

Layering Guacamole shouldn't cause any real trouble beyond that - the dashboard needs to run on a separate Unix machine and so can be pointed at all those desktops just fine once you set up the network interfaces.

The Github repo for the client says it's 50% Java, can someone clarify, is this an HTML5 client, or are there other things happening?

Server side is java

From the github readme:

  > guacamole-client is used to build the subprojects that  make up Guacamole, and
  > to provide a common central repository. Each project contained here is
  > completely independent of guacamole-client and can be built separately, though
  > the others may have to be built first. If all projects are built using
  > guacamole-client, Maven will take care of the proper build order.

My reading of this is that the client repo also contains the server, which is written in java

Guacamole is a Java program. It's basically a proxy between RDP/VLC and HTML5. Guacd (the java bits) connect to an RDP or VNC server on your behalf, and then you interact with the remote machine through guacd. Here's a simple text diagram

  [Windows RDP server] <--RDP protocol--> [linux Guacamole server] <--HTTP or Websockets--> [HTML5 client in your browser]

Wait.. so you're saying you need a linux server to access your windows server?

I'm guessing that since it's java, you can run guacd on either windows or linux.

Only the web application is Java, guacd is written in C:

http://guac-dev.org/doc/gug/guacamole-architecture.html

That's the configuration I use. You can run guacamole directly on the target server if you want. I'm reluctant to expose my Windows machines directly to the wild internet, and I don't want to learn how to configure an HTTPS reverse-proxy in Microsoft's ecosystem. Having a dedicated guacamole box is nice because I expose port 80/443 on my Linux Guacamole machine, and then use it to connect to any number of Windows and Linux computers behind my firewall/NAT.

Ok I see, thanks for the explanation.

That seems to be the case. Under "How do I get it?" it says:

> You will need a Linux or UNIX computer to host Guacamole.

Could this be used on a Mac?

I would like to have remote/shared access to Xcode + iOS dev stack... Or is there some other way to get that?

I use TeamViewer for that, AND Chrome Remote Desktop. I've found that I need both so that if TeamViewer doesn't work for some reason I've still got Chrome available to go in and fix it...

Hardly the best setup but at least it's free. Will be checking this out to see if it fits my reqs.

Just wondering: what features of HTML does Guacamole use to make this HTML5-only? Is it video tag? Canvas?

https://github.com/glyptodon/guacamole-client/search?q=video... By looking in the code I think they use Canvas, streaming video would be interesting. Looking at guacamole-common-js/src/main/webapp/modules/Tunnel.js I think they use WebSockets with a XMLHttpRequest fallback?

Looks like it also uses audio - https://github.com/glyptodon/guacamole-client/blob/5ae22ce20...

I'm thinking of the implication of something awesome like this. Hopefully in the long-run it will boost the likes of light LTE-enabled Chromebooks, at least for tech professionals. That of course requires high-speed LTE infrastructure and ISP backbones.

Eh, Chrome Remote Desktop and Fusionlabs' Chrome RDP both already allow Chromebooks to be used for remote desktops (the latter speaking actual RDP), although both are closed-source.

I do something similar using Ericom AccessToGo (FREE) to RDP from my Samsung Chromebook (ARM) to various Windows boxes.

So then do you see any advantage of Guacamole over those two other than the open/closed-source part?

I see that there are a number of folks around with Docker containers for Guacamole, but it seems there might be nice for there to be an 'official' container for this project.

This could enable some very low development cost cloudwashing of legacy desktop software!

This was my thinking as well. Or to allow formerly plugin-requiring apps to run on the server. Any ideas for how to lock this down on the server side so that it can only run ONE application?

Guacamole is just a go-between. For that sort of OS-integrated lockdown you will need to configure your target server (the box actually running VNC or RDP). No special support on the Guacamole end required.

I use something called Spark View for this. How does Guacamole compare?

Can this be used with custom credential providers through RDP?

I'd like to see some OS X binaries or a homebrew keg!

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