Apache Guacamole is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

, cross-platform, clientless remote desktop gateway maintained by the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the A ...

. It allows users to control remote computers or virtual machines via a web browser, and allows administrators to dictate how and whether users can connect using an extensible authentication and authorization system. Destination machines can be kept isolated behind Guacamole and need not be reachable over the internet. Remote access is performed via the guacd component, which uses the RDP,

VNC Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is a graphical desktop-sharing system that uses the Remote Frame Buffer protocol (RFB) to remotely control another computer. It transmits the keyboard and mouse input from one computer to another, relaying the g ...

or SSH remote protocols to access resources. Guacamole is clientless and doesn't require an agent to be installed on the resources being accessed. The fact that the client runs on web browsers allows users to connect to their remote desktops without installing a remote desktop client.

Components

Guacamole is made up of multiple components: a web application that is served to users, and a backend service ("guacd") that dynamically translates and optimizes native protocols into the Guacamole protocol. The part of Guacamole that a user interacts with is the web application.

Web Application

The web application provides the user interface, authentication, and authorization system. It does not implement any remote desktop protocol, but instead relies on guacd to translate remote desktop protocols into the Guacamole protocol. The

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of the web application is written in Java and runs beneath a servlet container like Apache Tomcat or Jetty. The client side of the web application is written in JavaScript and runs within the web browser.

guacd

guacd services requests to connect to remote desktops from the web application. It dynamically loads support for remote desktop protocols so that neither guacd nor the web application need to understand the specifics of any one remote desktop protocol. guacd and all client plugins use a shared library, libguac, to abstract away the Guacamole protocol and communication with the web application.

History

Guacamole was created in 2010 by Michael Jumper as an HTML5 VNC client leveraging components of a browser-based telnet client called "RealMint". The company Glyptodon LLC formed to support and develop the project, and donated the project to the Apache Software Foundation in 2016 where it entered incubation. In 2017, Guacamole completed incubation and became the Apache Guacamole top-level project. As an Apache Software Foundation project, Guacamole is licensed under the Apache License and is developed by a community of contributors. Development discussions and support take place on the project's mailing lists, and contributions are made through opening pull requests against the project's GitHub repositories. The project follows responsible disclosure practices and provides a private list for reporting and addressing issues with security implications.

Timeline

Literature

* Kalyan Ram, S. Arun Kumar, S. Prathap, B. Mahesh & B. Mallikarjuna Sarma
''Remote Laboratories: For Real Time Access to Experiment Setups with Online Session Booking, Utilizing a Database and Online Interface with Live Streaming''
in: Engineering & Internet of Things, Conference paper, p. 190—204

References

{{Apache Software Foundation Cross-platform free software Free software programmed in C Software using the Apache license Unix network-related software Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Free software programmed in JavaScript