Work From Home Using NX Server

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

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Most enterprises flirt with the idea of letting employees work from home but are not sure about the efficacy of the concept and tools that would support it. But in the current economic slowdown enterprises are looking at ways to save costs and so tools such as these come in handy. There are different ways to implement this concept.

The first option is simple- employees do their job on PCs and send it to office via email or store the same at some file server. But the chances of sensitive data getting leaked are pretty high. The second and more secure option is through a terminal service, where a client connects to the terminal server at the office and accesses the OS but the resources used are the ones that are present at an employee's home. So, if he wants to print a document, he would be able to do so through his home printer. This is especially useful when a company's client needs a quote for some product.
But would you keep a separate employee at office just to take printouts for such docs and courier them to the client? The better way would be to enable your employee to take printouts at home. Another scenario is that of enterprises with a mobile work force who require access to their office PCs and would occasionally need to take printouts.

Such a scenario merits a software that would enable employees to use local resources no matter what part of the globe they are in. There are quite a few software which let employees use local resources. NX Server is one such software. Here, we show how to implement this open source solution.

Deploying NX Server
The free version of NX Server allows only 2 users to connect at the same time, which might not be of much importance to enterprises. Hence, there is a separate enterprise version which provides unlimited concurrent connections, unlimited support, but with a price tag that starts at $794.50. In the enterprise edition you also get integration support for Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP. Installing the NX server is easy; we installed the Server on the latest Debian 5 OS-based system with 2 GB RAM, Core2Duo processor and 40 GB HDD. For installation, download three different files: nxserver, nxnode and nxclient from www.nomachine. com. Before installing, you have to change the permission settings for IPP CUPS. Because is some cases you need to have proper permission on IPP backend. For changing the permission run the following command:

# chmod 755 /usr/lib/cups/backend/ipp

Download the NX client setup from the Nomachine website and double click on the icon to start the installation process.	Once the installation is over, start the NX connection wizard. Provide the session name, host IP and then select the type of Internet connection you have.

Next select the OS type and the desktop (Gnome, KDE, etc) you will be accessing via NX client.	After selecting the desktop, select the size of the remote desktop and click on Next and then on Finish.

Now you need to run the following commands to install the nxserver. First install the nxclient, then nxnode and finally the nxserver.

dpkg -i nxclient_3.3.0-6_i386.deb
dpkg -i nxnode_3.3.0-12_i386.deb
dpkg -i nxserver_3.3.0-15_i386.deb

For enabling local printing, go to configuration options and then navigate to services. Check 'enable file sharing and printing' and then add the local printer.	Apart from these you also have options to disable traffic, ZLB stream compression, etc. These help in case you are using very low bandwidth.

The installed NX Server is automatically configured for basic work. Now follow the screen shots below to install the client tool on a Windows machine and access it remotely.

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