4 ms·

Show HN: Bunny – An Ephemeral Desktop in the Browser

15 points by intunderflow 5y ago

intunderflow 5y ago
Hi folks, Bunny is a project I've been working on over a few weekends, I initially built it to solve the problem I keep having where I want to test some software / break a computer in some way, but Virtual Machines are a bit unwieldy and take a while to set up. Bunny gives you a connection to an ephemeral desktop computer, which you have sudo access to (play nice :)), you can test stuff out and throw stuff around in there, and once you're done just close the tab and computer will cease to exist. There's a few things I still want to do, but I think this is MVP-ish enough to show now: - You have to pass a reCAPTCHAv3 challenge to use the service, I want to add fallbacks onto v2 and hCaptcha - I want people to be able to use a specific URL to ask for a specific OS (for example to get a bunny instance on Windows or Mac OSX it would be awesome if you could just navigate to bunny.lucy.sh/windows10 or bunny.lucy.sh/macos-bigsur, etc) - This doesn't work well on Mobile, I want this to work on Mobile since I've definitely needed a quick desktop PC on some occasions when out and about on my mobile phone. Behind the scenes, this is using Guacamole http://guacamole.apache.org/ http://guacamole.apache.org/ for the heavy lifting, really cool project :D Any feedback or comments appreciated :)
- gigel82 5y ago
  Everything is tiny (unreadable) and I cannot adjust the display resolution.
  - intunderflow 5y ago
    One of the pains of VNC is that I can't live-adjust the resolution to match the browser after setting up the device D:, the screen should scale to your browsers size which should make things better, is it failing to do that? I'll see if I can reproduce
    - doubled112 5y ago
      Would you consider using Xrdp and xorgxrdp, which can live adjust the display size? You might need a newer version of Xrdp or xorgrdp, but I have Guacamole connections to Linux desktops that do this smoothly.
      - intunderflow 5y ago
        I have a few experimental images using xrdp at the moment, the main reason I haven't turned it on yet is xrdp is really beefy on the machine and takes up a lot of the very limited resources (these aren't big computers) but if I can solve that or afford to put folks on better machines I'm definitely turning it on :D
doubled112 5y ago
I've long wondered if something like this could replace more traditional VDI. Of course, it would depend on being able to use Linux as the desktop. I imagined having Guacamole spin up a desktop container with a directory mounted into it for the user's homedir. The OS is ephemeral but not the user's data. It would never need to persist like the home directory. Need a different base OS? Provide other images that could be selected between. Update time? Upgrade the packages in the image and they roll out as people log out. Resource usage would be lower (than VM VDI setups) because the containers would disappear after they logged out. I never really got past the idea, but this reminded me.
chris_robinson 5y ago
Cloud VDI provides virtual desktop OS to the end user with all the necessary applications required for use like browser software & others. Hosted virtual desktop have many benefits such as working from anywhere, lower costs than traditional ways of computing & have subscription pricing model. Resource - https://bit.ly/37MELuL https://bit.ly/37MELuL

15 points by intunderflow 5y ago

Hi folks, Bunny is a project I've been working on over a few weekends, I initially built it to solve the problem I keep having where I want to test some software / break a computer in some way, but Virtual Machines are a bit unwieldy and take a while to set up. Bunny gives you a connection to an ephemeral desktop computer, which you have sudo access to (play nice :)), you can test stuff out and throw stuff around in there, and once you're done just close the tab and computer will cease to exist. There's a few things I still want to do, but I think this is MVP-ish enough to show now: - You have to pass a reCAPTCHAv3 challenge to use the service, I want to add fallbacks onto v2 and hCaptcha - I want people to be able to use a specific URL to ask for a specific OS (for example to get a bunny instance on Windows or Mac OSX it would be awesome if you could just navigate to bunny.lucy.sh/windows10 or bunny.lucy.sh/macos-bigsur, etc) - This doesn't work well on Mobile, I want this to work on Mobile since I've definitely needed a quick desktop PC on some occasions when out and about on my mobile phone. Behind the scenes, this is using Guacamole http://guacamole.apache.org/ http://guacamole.apache.org/ for the heavy lifting, really cool project :D Any feedback or comments appreciated :)

gigel82 5y ago
Everything is tiny (unreadable) and I cannot adjust the display resolution.
- intunderflow 5y ago
  One of the pains of VNC is that I can't live-adjust the resolution to match the browser after setting up the device D:, the screen should scale to your browsers size which should make things better, is it failing to do that? I'll see if I can reproduce
  - doubled112 5y ago
    Would you consider using Xrdp and xorgxrdp, which can live adjust the display size? You might need a newer version of Xrdp or xorgrdp, but I have Guacamole connections to Linux desktops that do this smoothly.
    - intunderflow 5y ago
      I have a few experimental images using xrdp at the moment, the main reason I haven't turned it on yet is xrdp is really beefy on the machine and takes up a lot of the very limited resources (these aren't big computers) but if I can solve that or afford to put folks on better machines I'm definitely turning it on :D

doubled112 5y ago

I've long wondered if something like this could replace more traditional VDI. Of course, it would depend on being able to use Linux as the desktop. I imagined having Guacamole spin up a desktop container with a directory mounted into it for the user's homedir. The OS is ephemeral but not the user's data. It would never need to persist like the home directory. Need a different base OS? Provide other images that could be selected between. Update time? Upgrade the packages in the image and they roll out as people log out. Resource usage would be lower (than VM VDI setups) because the containers would disappear after they logged out. I never really got past the idea, but this reminded me.

chris_robinson 5y ago

Cloud VDI provides virtual desktop OS to the end user with all the necessary applications required for use like browser software & others. Hosted virtual desktop have many benefits such as working from anywhere, lower costs than traditional ways of computing & have subscription pricing model. Resource - https://bit.ly/37MELuL https://bit.ly/37MELuL