VNC Possibilities

[John C. Quillan]

Simon Wittams wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the swift... btw its Robert, I'm just using my brothers account :)
> 
> >
> > Simon - thanks for all your comments.  I think a device driver would be a
> > very good way of doing the Windows server; we talk about it a bit on the web
> > server.  We've even got some hardware which we think we could persuade to
> > resemble a VGA card to the PCI bus and yet produce VNC output.
> 
> Bit expensive for freeware :) but good for headless boxes... but it would be
> hard to have a displaying and vnc-serving card without limiting the choice

> > >Have a distinct password for observers. The connection response from the
> > >server needs to be different, then if the client is 'observer aware' it
> > >can send an acknowledgement signal, and then not send any more signals
> > >of input to decrease traffic.
> >
> > Good idea, but the input is usually a very small amount of traffic compared
> > to display.
> >
> > >The clients acknowledgement signal should also include the maximal
> > >transfer rate, so it only gets sent what it can handle...
> >
> > Clients already only request what they can handle.  So you can have a slow
> > client on a modem on the other side of the world, and a fast client on a
> > local ATM network talking to the same server; one won't slow down the other.
> 
> Ahh, I see... I meant that if you use multicast for the observer mode, have
> different multicast groups for different bandwidths... in order to reduce the
> load on the server but not slow down the clients with too much data.

I haven't look at the protocall at all yet, but I was wondering if it
would be
possible to have some sort of redirection server that would connect to
one
server and serve many clients. This would keep the load off of the main
server
and distribute it to where it is needed.  you could create a topology as
follows.

              -Viewer
            /
MainServer -
            \                     - Viewer
             \                  /
              - ViewRedirector ---- Viewer
                                \
                                  - Viewer


> 
> > If we did audio it would
> > be a separate channel and not part of this protocol.
> 
> Hopefully with some kind of synchronisation... for slow clients with many
> possible routes.
> 
> Rob

The above redictor combined with some sort of audio streaming would
be great for distributed classrooms on the internet. I was looking at
Spead Freely 6.1c at  http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/unix/ .  
It also runs on both Windows an Unix, and is in the public domain. I
am currently having problems because there is no place to do demo's at
work big enough to hold more than a coulpe of people.  With this I can
at least get a few monitors going so people don't have to crowd.


John C. Quillan