Remote access of Abaqus via VNC
Why Use VNC, The benefits of VNC are not always immediately obvious. Its strength is the fact that problems that happen with other methods of remote access do not happen with VNC. So unless you have already had some of these issues, VNC advantages are a little bit obscure.
What are the advantages? It provides a robust, fully functioning GUI environment.
I read IT documentation with sentences like these all the time and they seem almost meaningless but bear with me. You can think of VNC as two bits of software:
- A VNC client, which runs on your personal computers.
- A VNC server, which runs on our Computers at Trumpington St. Main site
What the VNC client does is make a connection from your personal computer to your VNC server session at Trumpington St. (which has all the software you want to use).
For the moment think of it like making a mobile telephone call from a car to work. You call someone at work and ask them to do something for you. As you're talking the driver takes you through a tunnel and you loss connection. The person at work hang up the phone and carries on doing your job. As you come out of the tunnel, you redial the work number and start talking to your colleague. Who in your absence has completed your job and give you the information.
VNC will do the same for you. You use the VNC client to call the VNC server and start your work running on the server. Once the job is running you can stay connected, hang up or the connection can break and the VNC server will carry on with your work, just like your colleague in the above example. When you are ready to reconnect to the VNC server you can pick-up your work again.
That's what the robust in, "It provides a robust, fully functioning GUI environment" means. The "fully functioning GUI environment" mean you get a copy of the Linux teaching system on your computer via the VNC client.
- Now for the disadvantages.
- You have a VNC server session running on our computers at Trumpington St. and roughly once a month we switch these computer off to do maintenance and you will lose your VNC server session.
- You are on your own computer running a VNC client. You cannot cut and paste from your own computer into the VNC software.