[Engine-devel] Adding VNC support

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 09:18:50AM +0300, Itamar Heim wrote:
> On 07/26/2012 05:36 PM, snmishra at linux.vnet.ibm.com wrote:
> >
> >Hi,
> >
> >    I am looking at adding VNC support in ovirt. What does the community
> >think? Ideas, suggestions, comments?
> 
> so to sum this up:
> 1. there is the new dialog to open vnc manually.
> http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/4790/
> 
> 2. Alon suggested it should be allowed to open this dialog for spice
> as well, not only for vnc.
> 
> 3. Alon also suggested to have a launch button on that window (or
> parallel to it) which will try to launch vnc or spice by returning a
> specific mime type response, allowing client to choose the vnc/spice
> client to run for this mime type, and passing command line
> parameters to it in the mime type reply.
> 
> 4. provide a vnc xpi/activex wrappers to allow launching it via web
> browsers like spice
> main limitation of this compared to novnc is you need to do this for
> every browser/platform.
> 
> 5. novnc
> 5.1 novnc client - i'd start with the one recently pushed to fedora.
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=822187
> 
> 5.2 novnc websocket server - i see three options
> 
> 5.2.1 extend qemu to do this, so novnc can connect to it directly
> like we do today for vnc/spice

I don't think this is a desirable approach. One of the nice benefits
you gain from using a websocket proxy is that you only need to have
one single TCP port exposed to the internet now. If you put websockets
in QEMU itself, you'd be stuck with having to open your firewall to
allow 100's of ports. With a separate web proxy, you can even make
each QEMU server now use a local UNIX socket for their VNC server,
since only the proxy needs to be able to connect. This means that
the VNC server would no longer be exposed to random local user
access too.

> 5.2.2 use the python based one from:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=822187

FWIW, this is what OpenStack Nova uses for its VNC proxy.


Daniel
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