Cloud And Docker Support

by Green Screens Ltd.

From beginning, Green Screens Terminal Service was built with having cloud environment in our minds as a strategic approach. It is the easiest and the simplest installation method of web based 5250 terminal service not only for Linux but for cloud environment also.

Recently we have updated our automation scripts to be even more robust and even easier to use. All comes down to download and execute single BASH script. Script will take care of everything for the most popular Linux versions.

It is even easier to update with command as sudo gsinstall.sh -u which will take care of updates in a bandwidth optimized way. This simple command can be scheduled through Linux Job Scheduler to trigger nightly for automatic updates.

We thoroughly tested and extended our support for following Linux distros:  

  • Debian
  • Ubuntu
  • Fedora (Red Hat)
  • Suse
  • ChromeOS

... and special Dockerized environments

  • CoreOS
  • Google Cloud Optimized OS

NOTE: Some cloud providers allows only ports 80 & 443. Terminal requires telnet and IBM i DDM services which are not allowed; thus, we did not implement support for their environments.

Installation procedure will prepare and install Docker on host system. All other parts of installation are Dockerized to not interfere with host environment leaving your system clean.

Storage for product settings is separated into Named Docker Volume preventing loss of data during complete reinstall or update.

Deinstallation boils down to two commands only: sudo systemctl stop docker-greenscreens && docker system prune --all (prune only if no other docker images used).

This is how simple it is.

Green Screen Terminal Service is customized to detect if it is running in the container environment and thus handling some of its features in a special way.

We also added server SSL configuration through web based admin console including support for SSL self-signed certificates and PEM format imports. Reason for that is not only to simplify some advanced configurations as SSL is, but also because of special Linux distros.

For example,

Google Cloud Optimized OS is very small image pre-configured with Docker and all possibilities to install additional software on running machine is very limited. This way, you are forced to use Docker only installations. In such case, additional configurations might be required as for SSL certificates setup, port redirections and port mappings.

Green Screen Terminal Service might be configured behind some load balancer and proxy services as NginX which might come in handy when using SSL and automated Let's Encrypt service. This brings more complicated setup, so we added easier method by exposing Green Screen Terminal Service directly and enabling SLL setup through web admin console.

For the end, we prepared a live test environment running in Google Cloud. It will be available soon so keep on watching our blog and LinkedIn posts for incoming updates...