On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Josh Thompson <josh_thomp...@ncsu.edu> wrote: > I've been hearing interest in an "icon on the desktop" type of access to > VCL.
I've also heard about interest - but there are several different venues in which this might be used. >The idea being that you could have some kind of broker script/app that > can be run which will interact with the VCL API to create a VCL > reservation, wait on it to be deployed, This covers at least two different situations. For classroom use, there is usually going to be a block reservation and so there will no waiting for deployment - and this may be the optimum situation for an icon. If there is a substantial waiting time for an ad hoc reservation (possibly over 10 minutes) then I think the icon approach loses some of its value. >and then connect to the reserved > system (ideally without requiring the user to log in to the reserved > system). This is almost true with the RDP Client (obtained from Microsoft.com) which I use on my Mac. I just double click the RDP file icon and it takes care of the login. I'm not sure why this doesn't seem to work on Windows computers. (There are a number of versions of the RDP client and of the operating systems involved and I haven't checked them all.) >That app could then just be launched through an icon to gain access > to a VCL provisioned system. > > Several years ago, I wrote something along the lines of this in python/tk. > That was more of a proof of concept and would need a good bit of work to be > useful to others. > > I'm starting this thread to start gathering information on who is interested > in this idea and what requirements you would have for it. I'd also like to > know if anyone would be interested in helping with the development of it. > > So, if you have any interest in this, please reply to this thread with > -requirements you would have As Art pointed out, there are security aspects to consider. From the classroom aspect - we have to be concerned about whether this is a multi-user machine, or a single-user machine. > -how you would envision it to work Will it be set to login to a pre-assigned image, or will the user be free to select? > -any interest in development of it --henry schaffer
