USB over IP

Here's a demo of what's possible when you combine USB over IP technology and thin clients such as the Sun Ray.  If your desktop is Solaris or Linux, the USB ports on a Sun Ray really are USB over IP, but what about when we want to pass devices up to Windows sessions?  Unfortunately at that point we are at the limitations of RDP or ICA.  Unless we use something else like a USB over IP hub. 

The device I'm using is an AnywhereUSB device from Digi.  Even cooler stuff can happen when you use a VM technology like Win4Solaris or Win4Lin such as consumer level biometric devices.

 

Posted on: Jul 13, 2007

Posted by: ThinGuy

Category: Sun Ray

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Comments:

Great Demo !! Are you using the SunRay Windows Connector (RDP Client) or was it a Win4Solaris CVM running on the SunRay server ? In booth cases, I don't think this would change much the demo, isn't it ?

Posted by Sebastien Stormacq on July 14, 2007 at 08:34 AM PDT #

Hi Sebastien,
The iPod demo would work via a normal RDP session but the biometric would not. Why?
because the XP VM is also sitting at the login screen and since the USB over IP device is connected to the VM, it actually logs you into the console of the VM vs the thin client.

I'm going to play around with changing the GINA for the local console vs RDP but you still wouldn't be able to use fast user switching. That would require Win4Solaris or Win4Lin.

Posted by ThinGuy on July 14, 2007 at 09:57 AM PDT #

Rather than waiting for microsoft, I wonder if it would be possible to use a combination of virtual XP instances running on ESX with the VMware VDI. Basically you would have a side channel that interfaced with the virtual usb device on the esx box and the OS would be none the wiser.

Posted by John on July 17, 2007 at 11:18 AM PDT #

Hi John, Yes, virtual XP + ESX with the VMware VDI is really good solution. Moreover if you are accessing virtual XP from Windows based PC, FabulaTech USB over Network solution works fine also USB over Network

Posted by Andrew on July 20, 2007 at 12:19 AM PDT #

While I'm extremely tempted to treat the comment by Andrew as SPAM, I'd like to respond. The deal with the video is that the biometric device GINA is running on the "Console", so while the finger print reader works via RDP, you actually get logged into the console, which steals your RDP session to your VM. This is true even with VMWare. Now the reason I consider this SPAM...how in the world is a Windows PC based software that maps USB ports to other Windows based PC's (fat clients) going to work on a Sun Ray? Have you ported the client portion of your software to Solaris? Nope.

Posted by ThinGuy on July 20, 2007 at 07:49 AM PDT #

this may be an interesting way to work around the now usb support in virtualbox for solaris hosts

Posted by phil on November 09, 2008 at 05:22 AM PST #

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