Origo Desktops: One-Click Remote Desktop Services

Windows Remote Desktop Services (RDS) provides access to native Windows apps from anywhere. This is great, but setting up the infrastructure is difficult; handling software deployment and scaling as you go even more so. Windows Server 2012 R2 provides most of the pieces of a powerful RDS setup, but the setup is thoroughly cumbersome to get right.

We aim to improve this with Origo Desktops.

Overview of RDS

Components of an RDS deployment are:

• RD Gateway:
• RD Connection Broker:
• RD Session Host(s): Pool of servers (session hosts) that handles connections.
• RDS Factor
• RD Web Access: Web-UI with published windows applications.

Origo Desktops helps orchestrate and spin up all components.

Development Quick Start

Install prerequisites:

• Download and install vagrant
• install vagrant-libvirt vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt

Start controller server:

$ vagrant up ubuntu --provider=libvirt

Provision the server:

$ vagrant ssh ubuntu
$ cd /vagrant/conf
$ ./install.sh

Point browser to http://localhost:8080 or http://GUEST_IP.

During development you'll likely want to run the Django development server instead of gunicorn / nginx. This enables Python debug info and changes to Javascript are immediately available:

$ sudo service gunicorn stop
$ /vagrant/runserver.sh

In addition, you'll likely also want to run the Celery workers manually during development:

$ sudo service celeryd stop
$ /vagrant/runcelery.sh

Install Active Directory

RDS must connect to an Active Directory. Below are the commands to install it on Windows Server 2012 R2:

$ vagrant up ad
$ AD_IP=$(vagrant ssh-config ad | grep HostName | awk '{print $2}')
$ cd scripts

# The active directory server is `sysprep`'ed, otherwise since we use the same base image
# additional Windows servers will bitch about duplicate SIDs..
$ winrm vagrant@${AD_IP} < install/sysprep.bat

# Server restarts. Fill in the needed information in the GUI. 
# And rename the server, e.g., rename to ad:
$ winrm vagrant@$AD_IP -a ad < name.ps1

# rename requires restart
$ winrm vagrant@$AD_IP 'shutdown /r /t 0'

# Install ad role
$ winrm -a vagrant -a adm.example.com -a V@grant vagrant@${AD_IP} < install/ad-install.ps1

Above I'm using winrm from the host machine. Winrm is already installed on the ubuntu machine, to install it on the host machine run:

$ pip install -e git+https://github.com/jakobadam/pywinrm@cli#egg=pywinrm

Note: I have an outstanding pull-request in the upstream pywinrm repo: diyan/pywinrm#42. Therefore I pip install the branch. For more example of how to use the winrm cli have a look at: https://github.com/jakobadam/pywinrm/blob/cli/winrm/cli.py

Example of using winrm with kerberos and a domain user:

$ kinit admin@ADM.EXAMPLE.COM
$ winrm -v -t kerberos user\adm@rds.adm.example.com 'dir'

Images

Images are built with Packer. Templates for creating Ubuntu 14.04 Server are Windows 2012 R2 are available at https://github.com/jakobadam/packer-qemu-templates

Note: The server running the RDS required Active Directory must be sysprep'ed. Otherwise, Windows won't join servers to the domain due to a duplicate id.

Note: Origo Desktops uses pywinrm to control the windows servers, we don't support kerberos yet. Until then Windows servers must have their requirements for winrm relaxed:

call winrm set winrm/config/client/auth @{Basic="true"}
call winrm set winrm/config/service/auth @{Basic="true"}
call winrm set winrm/config/service @{AllowUnencrypted="true"}
call winrm set winrm/config @{MaxTimeoutms = "3600000"}

License

Origo Desktops is an open source project, sponsored by Origo Systems A/S, and released under terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3.