Episode: 836
Title: HPR0836: Jeff from No Machine
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0836/hpr0836.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:15:39

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I'm at Ohio Linux Fest talking to some guy from no machine.
What is your name?
My name is Jeff Feige.
Hi Jeff.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
So I kind of read up on your data sheet about no machine and frankly I don't feel like
I could even try to summarize it.
So what is no machine exactly?
No machine is a method for secure access to hosted desktops and hosted desktops can be
anything from your personal desktop at your house to a cluster of desktops at an office
or where a cluster of desktops is in the cloud.
Nice.
So it's a little bit like VNC or something like that perhaps?
A little bit like Citrix.
Citrix is a little more mature than us so they have more features set.
A little like VNC, a little like Citrix, VNC is screen scraping technology.
We are kind of piggybacking on top of X.
Gotcha.
Okay that's interesting.
What does the NX stand for?
It seems like your data sheet is talking a lot about no machine in X software.
What is that?
It stands for no X.
So basically right, yeah so the concept there is that we don't have to do an X forwarding
to bring applications back to your desktop.
And this is cross-platform, correct?
The server side is currently Linux only but the desktop side or remote side is available
on Mac, Windows, Linux, so does cloud cross-platform.
We do plan on having a Windows server piece out hopefully by the end of the year.
Okay, not that anyone cares but the Linux server is fine.
That's the low-hanging fruit, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so what, I mean, I don't know, I'm just a plain old user, I'm not a programmer, I'm
not a big business, is this something that I would be interested in looking at or is
this like sort of for the SysAdmin's out there with a bunch of stuff going on?
It's actually both.
If you use a Linux desktop at home, you would certainly want to look at it.
If you want to access that desktop from somewhere, it is without a doubt the best way to do
that.
From the casual user to the SysAdmin who has a particular application, they may not be
able to access from the shell remotely that they would want to bring across X to increase
that performance or for an enterprise that wants to do VDI-type solutions hosting multiple
of that stuff for multiple users.
Okay, very cool and obviously the next question is what about security?
What kind of stuff is, I mean, is this based on SSH or something or is it?
We use SSH for our carrier protocol, so all of the security that's available in the
SSH protocol is ingrained into our product from the get-go.
Got you.
All right, that's actually really neat.
Is it free?
Is it support?
What's the model here?
We have a couple different products.
We have a free product that is available for downloads, free for life, download it, use
it multiple two concurrent users and then our products go up from there.
So we have supported products, so when you buy our product, you get a year's worth of
support and it's a subscription-based product.
Okay, so just to clarify, because all of a sudden this is becoming something that I could
actually see some uses for in my day job, so just to clarify, if you didn't want to
set up for instance a VNC on the server that lets people in, you could actually, as
long as their desktop computer at the job has the support for no machine, then they could
access that from outside, as long as you're like, okay, with the whole SSH thing.
Absolutely, and you could even, even if you use VNC at your personal desktop, you could
set up a gateway with our product as well, and proxy VNC, or you could proxy XDM.
So if you have, you could set up one gateway, have 10 PCs behind, and proxy that XDM utilizing
our compression, and bring that back to your desktop.
And I don't know how much you can say about like the technique or the technology or whatever.
I mean, is that part of how you do that sort of thing, is just like compress the heck out
of the frames on the desktop, you know?
Basically what we do is we break apart the active protocol, we break the images out,
we compress them separately, so that's, you can select that level of compression too.
We use JPEG and RGB compression for the images, and then we cache, and use some client-side
prediction, and we use compression on the X stuff as well, yeah, it's over my head
too.
Yeah, completely.
I have no idea what you just said, but it sounded really cool.
Yeah, it is, it works really well, and go out and get it, man, machine.com.
Yeah, thanks for the info, thanks a lot, all right, bye.
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