Thin Client Computing on the Cheap

Many, many years ago I was attending a trade show and I saw something really cool. There was a booth set up with a couple of screens which had card readers attached to them. You could insert one of their sample cards and a screen popped up running Windows and a couple of applications. When you removed the card, it was gone. You could then walk to one of the other terminals and insert the card - and there was what you were last working on (instantly). It was pretty neat, and the concept was simple. Running on the back end was a heavy duty server which was emulating a dozen or so Windows machines. The front end was a dumbed down Linux terminal which just connected the user to the virtual Windows machines by means of a remote connection protocol (RDP). There was a little more to it, such as strong certificate based security, but we won't tackle that just yet.

My plan today was to create a collection of virtual Windows machines, and a USB "key" which could connect me to one simply by inserting it to a workstation.

The Server: In my case, this was easy since I all ready have a Linux box running VirtualBox. If you want to create this environment, go on out to VirtualBox.org and get yourself a copy. Note that it's *FREE* to those who qualify (read the fine print). Also, there is an Open Source Edition which is free to everybody, but it lacks some key features like USB support (so avoid it for this discussion). Once you have VirtualBox you will want to create at least one workstation. This can be anything really. In my case, it was Windows XP. In the settings for that workstation you will want to go into Settings and then Remote Display. Enable remote display and set your port number (default will be 3389).

The Workstation: I am referring here to the "dumb terminal" that you will be using. This should be on the same network as the server (or there should be routing established between them). Nothing needs to be done special on this workstation. It should be running Windows for our discussion. In my case I am using Windows XP boxes.

Prepare an RDP File: This can be done on any Windows machine. Basically we just want to make a settings file that we can put on our Thumb Drive. To create this, get onto a Windows PC and click Start > All Programs > Accessories > Communication > Remote Desktop Connection. Enter your IP and port number like this SERVER:3395. If you used the default port of 3389, just enter the server name. You can specify all sorts of other info here if you want. Many of these settings have no bearing since you are connecting to VirtualBox, and not "Windows itself". When you are done, choose to save your settings. Save this right onto your thumb drive and call the file "connect.rdp".

The Thumb Drive (or Jump Drive): This is where all my work came in. You will need to create a couple of batch files on the root of the thumb drive. Here is what they are named, and what should go inside of them ....

autorun.inf - This will initiate your remote client upon plugging in the Thumb Drive.
[autorun]
open=connect.bat
ACTION = LAB CONNECT

connect.bat - This is required to launch the RDP session, and the "watcher".
SET STARTRUN=%0
COPY %0\..\*.* C:\TEMP
C:
cd C:\TEMP
start /normal RDP.bat
start /normal WAIT.bat

RDP.bat - This will launch the remote window and ultimately quit.
mstsc /f connect.rdp
EXIT

wait.bat - This will watch for the removal of the thumb drive. If it's removed, the remote session is closed within 3 seconds.
GOTO CHECKEXIST

:CHECKEXIST
IF EXIST %STARTRUN% GOTO WAIT
GOTO KILLTASK

:WAIT
PING -n 3 127.0.0.1>null
GOTO CHECKEXIST

:KILLTASK
taskkill /f /im "mstsc.exe"
EXIT

With all this in place, here is how it will work.

When you insert your thumb drive, Windows XP will find the autorun.inf file and use it to launch an "Autorun list" in Windows XP. All you should have to do here is press enter (for security reasons this choice cannot be made automatically). At that point, you should see a remote connection window pop up. This whole process takes a few seconds.

While you are remotely connected, there will be two Command Prompt windows lingering in the background. One is just running the RDP application. The other is running a watch on the thumb drive. If you watch it, you will see that the PC pings itself three times, sending the result to "nowhere". The reasoning behind this is to give the PC something to do to waste time. Windows XP does not have a sleep or wait method that you might use to waste time cycles. Every time it completes it's three pings, it will check for the existence of the drive letter being used by the thumb drive. Through some clever tricks involving the "%0" variable, we are able to determine this drive letter regardless of what was chosen when it was inserted. If the drive letter is gone, the batch process hunts down the RDP task and kills it, then ends that script by exiting. The other script which had been running the RDP task moves to the next line, which tells it to exit also. The result is, the remote connection window and all it's friend vanish almost the instant the the thumb drive is removed.

You will see that my scripts first copy themselves to C:\Temp before running. The reasoning behind this was that if the drive is removed while a batch script is running from it, the script will fail and leave a "Terminate Batch" prompt on the screen. A colleague noted that in a production environment you would probably want yet another batch file in this process which removes all these items from Temp once it's done running. But it's a work in progress.

Next, I will focus on adding some form of security to this process as there presently isn't any.