As the Swedish winter is getting colder and colder and the Cendio office yet again has been decorated for Christmas, we are happy to end this year by releasing ThinLinc 4.18.0. As usual, this accompanying blog post will summarize the release highlights.
Restraining the load balancer
When ThinLinc is configured in a cluster, new sessions are load balanced between the clustered machines. Up until now, ThinLinc’s only concern has been meticulously leveling out the load between the machines. Up until today, this was done without any consideration of the maximum capacity of the machines.
As of this ThinLinc release, you can now assign a maximum number of ThinLinc sessions allowed per machine. Say, for example, that the machines in your ThinLinc cluster are equipped with beefy GPUs. If these GPUs can only handle the workload from a one or two users simultaneously, being able to set a hard user limit on the machine becomes key.
Strengthened security
ThinLinc is used extensively in organizations where security is critical. A recurring request from such organizations has been the ability to enable HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) headers in ThinLinc’s web services. In short, this header will enforce that a secure HTTPS connection is used in all future connection attempts to the server, preventing certain types of attacks. You can read more about it here.
While already knee-deep in the headers set by our web service, we also put some effort into silencing header-related nag from common web service vulnerability scanners. These changes do not have any real security implications, but should help check a box or two in scenarios where vulnerability scanners part of the software procurement process.
Rethinking the documentation
Despite our excellent documentation feature coverage, these last two decennia of ThinLinc development resulted in quite a bit of cruft accumulating throughout the documentation. As this has been a pet peeve of ours for a while now, it feels great to say that we’ve had time to really get our hands dirty restructuring, rewriting, and tidying up the ThinLinc Administrator’s Guide.
The main focus of this effort has been around the first half of the documentation, covering what ThinLinc is and how it is initially installed. The main highlight being a completely rewritten guide taking you step by step from server initial download to a functioning multi-node ThinLinc cluster.
As always, this release contains numerous minor enhancements across the board to make ThinLinc even more functional, easy to use, and secure. For the full list of changes, see the ThinLinc 4.18.0 Release Notes. The 4.18.0 server and clients are available on our download page. We look forward to hearing what you think on the ThinLinc Community.