X11 client server, remote desktop, 10gbE, and weird FF shit

[ted leslie]

Just read an article about 10gbe, and how it just fell huge in price (but it seems not yet in CND),
supposedly 10gbe 2pt cards are 400$

i was waiting for this, i want to bond the pair, and throw it off to another system as a file server
(i.e. 2GB/s, thats Bytes!) would be nice file system speed! have that box have 12GB ram for cache (or whatever is super cheap these days),
and a bunch of raided high speed intel flash drives, and sustained transfers hopefully would be 2GB/s from the file server,
which, as the article i read pointed out, the local drives will now become the bottle neck on systems, given one can SAN/NAS at 2GB/s.

this got me thinking about also having a main desktop that is really tricked up for compiz-fusion, and multimedia,
but then X-remoting into the box (at the other end of the bonded  2GB/s connection),

it has been a while since a remote X'd, .. it was the norm back in the early 90's (at university), sun x-terms and such,
but I rarely revisited that since then as a main way of operating, well until the thought of cheap 2GB/s networking!

So I just tried a remote X to another box i have (even used ssh -X so the connection was encrypted, which I will bypass
if i set this up as a usual environment, but given my tests, i have that enc. stage adding a bit of slow down),
I am also connected at just 100mb ethernet.
i did a xterm, then a image viewer, there is some complaining on the command line, but everything seemed fine,
and not all that slow.
I played a 1080i HD video (using ffplay) and it was not able to play at full speed (naturally), but it was decent,
and with 2GB connection it would be as if served local (file on local disk, and locally pumping to video display).

I however was massively confused by running firefox on the remote machine,
it started firefox, but it was the firefox (binary) on my local machine,
so naturally i figured i got kicked out of the box and was really running it on my local machine,
nope, .. i run firefox on the remote machine (over X), and it starts my local one!!
i killed the local instance of the FF, and re-tried, and it then brought up the FF running from the remote (but displaying local) as expected.
this is weird!! i guess the WM on the local somehow intercepts, and .... ?? anyone know?

anyways, what i would like feed back on is ....
does anyone have any  knowledge about stuff that doesn't work well over a x-remote session?
i can probably figure out the firefox issue ... but i am wondering if anyone has experience with
some apps that just will not work, perhaps because they just need to have local access to the video,
(that reminds me, i should try and play "world of goo" over it),
or they get tricked up some how on the X environment. I thought doing some 1080i HD, and running a bunch of video players,
and even multimedia through the browser would some how screw up, but all seemed to work, but again some warnings, errors
on the command line, but didn't seem to effect the operation.

This set up appeals to me because I am always installing the latest greatest linux distro,
openSuse, sidux, ubuntu, depending on the release dates, (as well as rolling updates),
but what i really would like to do, is have a server with a bunch of VM's running,
and one is say a linux VM for email, say SLED with the latest evolution and ability to get into the corp email server.
another for say the most recent OpenOffice, and other business apps.
one for maybe my win XP vmware setup,
another is perhaps a VMWARE OSX10.5 install (for x-platform code dev testing) and cubase,
all these x-remoting to the main desktop client @ 2GB/s

this way i can selectively update the OS's, as i need to, and not  all at once, then test out 10 different main apps i need to run,
and have to put up with potential issues. also i can backup the whole VM (convenient for backups, and back outs), and also have a decent
set up to trial, and stage other linux distros.

So any feed back on failed X-remote stories would be valuable. Before I drop coin on a 10gbE set up.
(all though i eventually will for the NAS/SAN ability, but would do it sooner, if it rocks as a x server environment).

Does a popularity/cheapness of 10gbE sort of kill the whole "wireless" thing, and get us all back to wired in the home,
with cable drops around the house? no 20000mbs wireless on the horizon i am guessing? or would that just be a microwave oven? :)

oh , and assuming the x server env. is viable for most anything, there is just one nasty problem that will remain,
copy/cut/paste across all the systems????, i wonder what there is out there to allow that? some common network clipboard (registered
across a whole bunch of systems?), solves it, if it exists, but still a bit clunky.


-- 
ted leslie <tleslie-RBVUpeUoHUc at public.gmane.org>
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