Remote Application XServe?

[kaliban]

Hello:

I've been getting very mixed answers on this question from various departments at Apple, so I'm hoping someone here might have experience to answer.

We're switching from a mostly Windows and Linux shop to a mostly Mac and Linux shop (hurray!). I want to run OSX Server on an XServer and allow multiple remote users to simultaneously access the server from their local macs, as if they were sitting at the desktop of the server and running typical applications, such as Office, Graffle, etc.

This type of arrangement is very simple to setup on a windows server. In fact, I can use windows free remote desktop client from my powerbook to login to a windows server regular desktop gui, login as myself and run the web browser (for those extreme cases where I need access to IE), and you would think I was sitting at the windows machine if you saw my powerbook screen. Multiple other users could simultaneously login to their accounts, over the Internet from other locations with no problem. So far, nobody I speak with at Apple, including tech support, seems to have encountered this feature request.

I thought Remote Desktop would be the answer, but I'm told Apple's Remote Desktop only will allow me to login from the server to other clients and control those machines. Great for administration, but I'm looking for the reverse. And I want to be able to login to the OSX Gui and run applications simultaneously from different mac clients as different users.

I've looked at TimBukTu online, but it also looks to be for administering remote machines as opposed to allowing remote clients to access the server and run applications from the desktop.

Hard for me to believe Windows would blow Mac away in this department. Can anybody help?

Thanks,

-k

 

[jnmacuser]

I don't know how much this helps, as it's not exactly the same, but we have Mac users running Remote Desktop from their Macs via a program called X11.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

These users connect to a PC server though, not a Mac server. I would assume that you can X11 into a Mac server just as easily however. But if Apple haven't suggested this i guess that you can't. Still i thought it might be worth looking into.

From my experiences with X11, it works exactly the same as Windows' RDC.

 

[kaliban]

I don't know how much this helps, as it's not exactly the same, but we have Mac users running Remote Desktop from their Macs via a program called X11.

Thanks for your input. I really suspect, or for some reason can't help believing that OS X Server automatically works the way I want it to, right out of the box. I just think Apple has strangely neglected to train their front line people on the server product, since nearly everyone I spoke with in various departments over there seemed to know absolutely nothing about it.

I dug up a bunch of PDFs from Apple's online docs, and though it's hard to tell for sure, it looks to me as if it probably has this feature built in, as well it should. I can hardly imagine how it wouldn't, in fact. I was just hoping someone who's actually used OS X Server could confirm that for me, since no one at Apple seems to have the foggiest notion.

-k

 

[kaliban]

Well, I did more research and spoke with more knowlegable folks in Apple's tech support department. I was shocked to learn that OS X Server currently does not support multiple simultaneous desk top iterations.

The next major release, Leopard, is supposed to add support for running multiple iterations of OS X simultaneously, however, and hopefully the server version will included this functionality as well, and be released soon. It sounds like that function likely will solve the problem of multiple users logging in to the server and working there on their own desk top. We'll see.

Leopard Desktop version should be out around August 2006 or so.

-k

 

[Blisterphish]

I don't claim to have an answer here but I'm trying to better understand what you are after. It sounds to me like you are looking for an application server that works like terminal server in that it creates it's own session for each connected user? If you just wanted each user to have their own desktops housed on the server then you could setup home folders and have them hit it via netinfo directory. In this case the apps have to be loaded on each local machine though. I think you can load the apps on the server then create shortcuts to the apps on the user desktops. This would depend on the app though because it may not allow more than one running instance. Even then it would be a janky setup. I am surprised that Apple doesn't offer soemthing like this. Have you looked at a third party product like Citrix that is cross platform? It's pretty expensive though and I don't know if the server side runs on a mac. If you find an answer post it.
-Dave