Some Project Updates

I wanted to blog one more update before the Holidays. I'll be off the next week enjoying time with friends and family.

We received a patch from Barracuda that allows our web filter to work in a manner better suited for our network design (all users coming from the same IP address). This was the last hurdle before deploying our new 64bit Firefox server. It will be nice to see the 48 hyper-threading CPUs in production. It should be a nice upgrade for our users and make their sessions more responsive. We also got a circuit upgrade and more bandwidth. This should go live the second week in January.

Now that my iPad prototype login is finished, I spent time bringing over more shortcut icons from the production GNOME server and testing them on the new one. Mostly all that remains is Windows apps now, and they are being QA'd as we move from using Citrix to RDP. My coworker has also been experimenting with running them in seamless windows, which would be a nicer user experience.

We had a utility on the old GNOME server to allow people to share their desktops with one another using VNC (x11vnc). What I saw when lingering in the support area is that they spent as much time showing people how to initiate this request as they did actually solving their issue. Users have a hard time finding new icons. So in my new design, the originator sends a vnc request and once accepted their desktop remotely displays. All the users have to do now is wait for a popup window, accept it and then get their support from our staff. I have also experimentally added a few more options to the UI, and having a fun time learning to use Glade and Python. The shot below shows the screen. You perform a search for the user, it matches their name and alerts you that they are online (green button) and then gives you options to take over their screen. It also gives you information about their resolution, color depth and thin client OS release number.



Nomachine released a preview of NX 4 last night, and being that this will be used for several of our projects I took the time today to get it installed and test it. The install process was quick and easy, and I simply typed in the URL and authenticated and the GNOME desktop appears right inside Firefox. I am waiting for some networking to be altered to allow my iPad to connect to the City network so that I can test this from that device using Safari. This technology seems to be working pretty well and promise. I really need to give this all a good shakedown (and maybe read a few manuals ;) ), and will report further as it's deployed. In the shot below, I'm logged into GNOME and then using Firefox opened another session with a different account name.