I'm a new dev at Linode, and this is the first product I helped ship. It was very fun to work on - we used Node to write all of the glue that gets noVNC to talk to qemu behind the scenes. LMK if you have questions, I can probably answer them.
I sent some fixes up to noVNC (along with the colleagues that worked on Glish with me), but our node work is closed source and will remain so since it deals with some internal things like authentication. However, we have some pretty cool open source projects in the pipeline for the coming weeks/months/years/decades.
Pretty cool. I did a similar integration back in 2011 for a VPS provider when we shipped Windows. I ended up writing an auth provider for noVNC proxy though that verified a token passed in against a new endpoint in our API(with a bunch of security checks and expiry of course). Worked pretty well after cleaning up the proxy a bit(particularly the logging). I'm guessing Linode needs to handle a bit more load than we did of course :)
I actually really like Linode, and am worried the direction of this comment thread is going to be "Great, a frivolous feature probably containing a bunch of security vulnerabilities." Yes, Linode has made some mistakes in the past with security. But let's try to stay on topic today.
Graphical consoles have existed for just about every other hypervisor since... well, I've been virtualizing since ESX 3.5 days and even it had a graphical guest console.
(Title and link have been changed - original was "Linode Really Innovates")
We use twisted-vncauthproxy[1] to open a noVNC console from the UI to speak with the VNC port that each KVM is running on. Before that we used a Java applet with a similar vnc proxy software.
Even in-browser consoles have been done for a long time. At least Digital Ocean and Ubiquity Hosting have... how else do you fix a broken firewall rule that blocks SSH or something?
Linode has had a textmode in-browser console for quite some time (LISH). This post is introducing GLISH:
> It's similar to Lish, except instead of connecting to your Linode's serial port and being text, Glish connects to your Linode's graphics port and displays, you guessed it, raster graphics.
Oh yea, I mean Linode's had the out-of-band in-browser console since at least 2009 when I first became a customer. Are DO and Ubiquity's consoles graphical, too? If that's the case then I agree this is catching up, not innovation.
Ubiquity's did, although I never had a reason to run a GUI on any of my DO instances -- however I don't see why they wouldn't -- all these "graphical" consoles just use VNC to project the GUI into the browser.
I suspect there hasn't been much demand for Linode to integrate a full graphical console, but it's been on their checklist for some time and are now getting around to it. Could be a sign of polishing up the platform, which I'm sure is good for all Linode users in general.
This sounds really cool. Unfortunately I can't test it out yet, as all of my Linodes appear to be the older Xen based ones. Migrating one now, just so I can see what all of the fuss is about...
