For years I have been looking for an easy way for a client to basically only receive keyboard, mouse and video from a server for a user account on that server. I used dedicated dumb terminals for this to boot into server for a while, but it is not maintanable and a huge workload.
There are well known legacy methods to do this but they are a pain to maintain, with sometimes really tough server configs as I mention above.
What I want to know if anyone know of a modern way to accomplish this, e.g. the client on a barebones Linux install, ssh into his account on the server and from there-on the server interface mouse and keyboard for the user is forwarded to the client and the user can use everything on the server. The client OS has no applications installed, and no more business other than to display video and forward mouse/keyboard and sound if possible. This saves all the resources needed to maintain the clients compared to using ssh/X-applications on a client.
I really dont want amateurish swimmy vnc and such outdated garbage. It needs be fast and snappy and directly from server indistinguishable from a normal linux system.
Sunn used to do this with impunity.
Anything new like this exists for Linux that is easy to configure?
Google searches just gives unrelated garbage from mousepushers.
Have you looked into SSH forwarding over X with optimisation flags? RDP, VNC or SSH are all slow compared to dedicated hardware, tho offered by DELL, HP and others. They support RDP and VNC protocols. So all clients need is those clients and auth info. That is the only solution that will help. Otherwise, all these RDP, VNC, and SSH will be slow and involve settings up config options on both the Linux server and desktop side.
Thank you for your answer:
I tried terminal server about 6 years ago and it was a royal pain and never considered it again.
I see from your link that they totally rewrote it in 2019 ( I would think they would have to)
Maybe you refer to the post 2019 terminal server (which I didnt try) as the original was an abomination.
I have old obsolete Sun clients that still works better than anything I can find with Linux.
I 'll give the totally-rewritten version a try if you recommend it is better than the original. If it is still the same, i want nothing to do with their pxe mess that was a true nightmare to maintain.
Thanks to both you and Nixcraft.
At least it came to be that I didnt know terminal server was rewritten and is therefore a good idea to try again.
Just that, is good info and helps already.
If anyone has more ideas it is still welcome, in the mean time I’ll get to work on the current suggestion.