OGON Still Active?

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Hi All,

I hope that everyone is doing well today and after a long hiatus, I am now back to try and continue to work on my PoC project, but this time I want to use XCP-ng as the hypervisor.

If I remember correctly, OGON was a server that allowed for RDP communications which gave me the interest in being able to integrate it into a hypervisor since most of them only have for VNC which I find very limited.

Of course, SPICS is also gaining interest but it is still far too new to reliably use as a VNC replacement which is one of the reasons that I like RDP in that it also supports the notion of channels that allow for things like Video, Audio, USB and network mappings, etc.

So then, can you please tell me the status of OGON and if it is still being actively developed as I want to investigate the possibility of integrating it into the XCP-ng (XenServer) hypervisor so that all of the VM consoles can communicate via any RDP client.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be very helpful.

Cheers,

Lonnie

[Bernhard Miklautz]

Hi Lonnie,

Am 26.01.21 um 20:34 schrieb Lonnie Cumberland:

> I hope that everyone is doing well today and after a long hiatus, I am
> now back to try and continue to work on my PoC project, but this time
> I want to use XCP-ng as the hypervisor.

welcome back :).

> If I remember correctly, OGON was a server that allowed for RDP
> communications which gave me the interest in being able to integrate
> it into a hypervisor since most of them only have for VNC which I find
> very limited.
>
> Of course, SPICS is also gaining interest but it is still far too new
> to reliably use as a VNC replacement which is one of the reasons that
> I like RDP in that it also supports the notion of channels that allow
> for things like Video, Audio, USB and network mappings, etc.
>
> So then, can you please tell me the status of OGON and if it is still
> being actively developed as I want to investigate the possibility of
> integrating it into the XCP-ng (XenServer) hypervisor so that all of
> the VM consoles can communicate via any RDP client.

Depending on which layer you want to integrate the RDP access you have
multiple possibilities.

In case you "simply" simply want to add a Console/gfx card access like
it's done for VNC using ogon (with the session-manger) might be rather
overkill as ogon itself just uses FreeRDP under the hood for most things
that are RDP related. If your data source is just bitmap based you can
use either directly the freerdp-shadow-server or the  ogon-rdp-server as
starting point. The ogon rdp server has more capabilities then the stock
freerdp-shadow-server. The Thincast workstation
https://thincast.com/en/products/workstation does something like this
(but much more as it has full 3d/gfx virtualization over RDP as well).

If you want to control the virtual machines  - like starting a specific
machine if a user logs in via RDP - ogon itself with the session-manager
is possible a good starting point. The session manager can quite (you
need to know some quirks ;) easily be replaced as well. An alternative
would be https://github.com/hardening/topka.

At the moment things are progressing slowly because none of the core
developers has time/possibility to work full time on ogon but the
project is still active. If you have questions let us know. We are also
still around in the #ogon-project channel on freenode.

Best regards,

Bernhard

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Hi Bernhard,

Thanks for getting back to me and you raise some good points for which I honestly do not know what is the best way to proceed. Perhaps if I lay out what I need then that would be helpful for you to comment on by having more information.  I looked into ThinStation a number of years back and although it seems like a very good product, it really did not meet the goals that I have in mind for this project as well as I do not recall it being open sourced as I wanted to try and build something that will be open sourced as well as with a whole list of goals that are a bit different than the ThinStation.

Then, I am building a PoC (Proof of Concept)) project based upon XCP-ng (XenServer), or actually have one other that I am also looking into as well called ACRN.  The project will also be designed to be RAM-based and have as small a footprint as possible so that it can boot from a simple and small ISO so as not to touch the user HDD, or SSD, that may be present. For that part there are other things that I have in mind (i.e. a FreeNAS or CryproNSA VM perhaps)

For this project the main user console will mainly be just a solid RDP client in dedicated full screen mode which will also be running in a VM with just enough OS to run that RDP client and nothing more. The point is to make that VM as well as the others also to be thin as possible.  Then the main RDP-client VM will connect to various VM consoles and those VM's will pass back video, audio, etc. as you might see in a normal RDP session.  Currently, most hypervisors use VNC to capture and interact with the VM consoles at the VM level while not dependent upon the Guest OS to provide VNC or RDP services.  I want to basically replace the VM level VNC server with a more powerful RDP server since RDP has channels and it can support other things as well like audio, shared drives, printer mappings, etc. This approach will also allow the user to use commodity RDP clients to connect to their system from other remote locations as well.  It's not just an RDP server/client system being setup for a workstation but is more of a whole Hypervisor-OS system that uses RDP as the primary way for the main console, and local/remote VM's to interact as there would be on VM's might be the "desktop" VM and it could have links to the other VM's but still pass through the console functionality (keyboard, mouse, audio, video, etc.) back through to the main local full screen RDP client.

I see this as:

1. One VM for the main local RDP client in full screen. --- This allows for local and remote connectivity with the same functionality and look-feel to the user.

2. One Desktop VM running which the (1) above connects. --- Effectively it is a user Desktop that starts up windowed RDP clients for each environment/application VM (3) below.

3. Multiple environment and application VM's that are started from the Desktop VM (2) above and are displayed as windowed application or environments on the Desktop. 

Of course, there will be many other features such as drives, printers, etc. but that is later.

I was thinking that an OGON RDP server could be a better solution than these existing VNC servers that are currently integrated.

Any thoughts, ideas or suggestions?

Cheers and have a great day,

Lonnie

[Bernhard Miklautz]

Hi,

Am 28.01.21 um 16:20 schrieb Lonnie Cumberland:

> Then, I am building a PoC (Proof of Concept)) project based upon
> XCP-ng (XenServer), or actually have one other that I am also looking
> into as well called ACRN.  The project will also be designed to be
> RAM-based and have as small a footprint as possible so that it can
> boot from a simple and small ISO so as not to touch the user HDD, or
> SSD, that may be present. For that part there are other things that I
> have in mind (i.e. a FreeNAS or CryproNSA VM perhaps)

Never heard of ACRN. Do you have a link?

> I see this as:
>
> 1. One VM for the main local RDP client in full screen. --- This
> allows for local and remote connectivity with the same functionality
> and look-feel to the user.
> 2. One Desktop VM running which the (1) above connects. ---
> Effectively it is a user Desktop that starts up windowed RDP clients
> for each environment/application VM (3) below.
> 3. Multiple environment and application VM's that are started from the
> Desktop VM (2) above and are displayed as windowed application or
> environments on the Desktop.
>
> Of course, there will be many other features such as drives, printers,
> etc. but that is later.
>
> I was thinking that an OGON RDP server could be a better solution than
> these existing VNC servers that are currently integrated.
>
> Any thoughts, ideas or suggestions?

Using RDP to access a virtual machines console would really be nice.
Indeed. VirtualBox can do this out of the box so possibly this could
also be a starting point for your research.

The ogon-rdp-server in it's current status just "translates" a shared
memory buffer to RDP with a very simple synchronization protocol. If
your machines run on the same host, your virtualization provides that
shared buffer and the RDP server can attach to it - it should be easy to
create a PoC.

The RDP channels however are a little bit more complex. They are
designed to be an extra process that is attached via OTSAPI and
therefore you  would need a simple session manager as well (for
authentication it might also be required).

Really an interesting project.

So long,

Bernhard