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

Fri Jun 19 16:21:14 UTC 2009

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 12:15:38AM -0400, ted leslie wrote:
> 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.

I think the system bus could become a bottle neck too.  How many lanes
wide does your PCIe bus have to be to handle that kind of bandwidth?
One 10Gbit port is over 3 times the throughput of a single SATA II port,
so it starts to add up.  What are those two port cards?  PCIe x8 or
something?

> 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).

Even 1Gbit ethernet will handle the speed of a modern high end disk,
although just barely.  Plenty for any video file you would ever transfer
(unless doing remote X and trying to transfer the decoded video, which
is just a silly thing to do given you don't get the benefit of using
the video card to assist in the decoding I suspect, unless XvMC works
remotely too).

> 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?

I guess firefox noticed there was a session already in the current X
session, and sent a 'load page' command to it rather than staring a
new binary.  I believe there is a command line option to override that
behaviour, but I can't remember what it would be.

> 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? :)

100Mbit ethernet makes wireless look like a joke.  Who needs 10Gbit for that?

> 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.

X has a clipboard, so that probably already works for a lot of stuff.
At least for text.

Your email client seems to have a problem with wrapping at 80 columns. :)

-- 
Len Sorensen
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