I found myself working in our lab today. For those of you who don’t know, our lab is filled with 3 racks of servers. (view a schematic here) I have never paid much attention to how loud it was, until today, when I tried talking on the phone while in front of the terminal.  Let’s just say it was challenging.  For an example, go find the largest industrial fan out there and turn it on high. From there, put your right ear right up to the fan and try talking on your cell phone with your left ear. You will find yourself 70% deaf.  It is even more challenging trying to type while talking. Needless to say, it is not the ideal situation. So I decided to figure out a better solution.
I often find myself using Windows remote desktop protocol(RDP) to port into other computers for access to different applications.  This is pretty useful when you are porting into other Windows machines. However, this does not work when you are porting into a Linux box, which is what I was working on today, and why I was in the server room.  Of course, as we all strive to work smarter, and frankly my ears were buzzing, I remembered that I still had access to HP RGS. RGS (Remote Graphics Software) was designed for remote multi-person collaboration with advanced graphics capabilities. It is a pretty cool solution for design/manufacturing/simulation industries. However, one of its features allows you to do a screen scrape from a Windows box to a Linux box. Or in other words, it will deliver the Linux server screen to your windows desktop similar to RDP.  So after a quick and easy install of the RGS sender software on the Linux box, I installed the receiver on my Windows desktop. Connecting was a breeze with the Linux IP address and my log in credentials.  Here’s a screen capture to give you an idea of what it looks like. By the way, Jing is a really useful tool for screen captures.

RGS is free on the receiving end and a software license can be purchased from CB Technologies pretty inexpensively for the RGS Sender. However, it is a free download and trial for 30 days, so if nothing else, play around with it and see if it is a useful tool for your everyday work needs.