Hi All,
Is there a way to connect to an interactive desktop session by using a VNC client?
Would this potentially increase performance?
Thanks and best regards
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I’d think you could manually, though I’ve never tried (if the network will allow you to connect to your compute nodes on 5900 or whichever port it s).
It may increase performance but to the determent of ease of use. Everything is over the web - a platform everyone already has access to, whereas very few folks have a VNC client already installed on their machine.
If you can extract the username/passoword out of the connection.yml and input it into the VNC client, and that client has connectivity to the compute node, then yea, you’re probably able to do this.
Actually, after coming back to this, if you set ENABLE_NATIVE_VNC=1 in /etc/ood/config/apps/dashboard/env you’ll get this tab below with some helpful instructions on connecting to your job through native a VNC client.
This is not yet documented, but I’m going to open a ticket to do so now. Hope that helps.
That’s really helpful - thanks!
When I activate this option, it shows the following:
I saw that /var/www/ood/apps/sys/dashboard/app/views/batch_connect/sessions/connections/_native_vnc.html.erb is used to display the information.
In the example you sent, did you hardcode the text to this file? Or perhaps there a template one can use?
Looks like there’s an OS toggle. The image you see is because you’re on Windows. What I’ve shown is for mac and linux.
This whole feature is before my time, so I can’t speak to it a whole lot. I’m not sure if OSC Connect is applicable for any site or if it’s OSC specific.
I shared the image because I was unaware of what’s shown to windows users (I primarily use Linux), so I apologize if I shared something that’s not useful to you.
OSC connect is OSC specific at this point. We never had enough people requesting it and it kinda goes against the grain of having everything in OnDemand be zero-install. But some people at OSC continue to use it for the better VNC experience.
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Just to document the history here, we had a bundle of open source apps we called ‘OSC Connect’ which included things like PuTTY for SSH terminal access and Xming for X Windows access for us on Windows PCs. There were a small wrapper app around them that registered the osc:// prefix with the OS so it would be launched and then launch the appropriate other apps. This was before ‘Open’ On Demand was really a thing and On Demand was only OSC On Demand, customized just for OSC. We didn’t need to have an OSC Connect app for Mac/Linux systems because they have terminal / X Windows capabilities inherent to them.
Note, Windows 10 now does have SSH capabilities built in to the command line (https://www.howtogeek.com/336775/how-to-enable-and-use-windows-10s-built-in-ssh-commands/), but doesn’t have X Windows native.
Hence, what you are seeing here is the vestiges of early OnDemand code we haven’t updated and probably should.
To confirm, this assumes the port 49102 is accessible correct? Client > Server