The Red Cross is part of the civil protection services in Germany since decades and is mostly run by volunteers. One of the numerous tasks people do there is ambulance service when damaging events occour or for planned public major events.

Such events require to quickly build up infrastructure in either unforeseeable locations, infrastructure that needs to provide services reliably for longer than a week, or both.

We provide the ambulance service for “Cranger Kirmes”, a funfair taking place every year and lasting about 10 days.

Within this time, a control center is build up nearby the event temporarily, with a demand for reliable IT infrastructure.

Until 2017, client PCs were a mixture of donated general purpose PCs. As server, a modified standard PC was used, providing netboot via PXE and one “shared” hard drive via NFS. The solution was built by hand and should be replaced by something that is well-known, supported by a community and has documentation available. Moreover, there was demand for virtualization to be flexible and let the server provide additional services in the future.

Starting with 2018, the whole infrastructure was rebuilt from scratch. A rollable 19 inch rack was acquired, a rack mountable server has been donated and basically all supplementary hardware could be mounted permanently into the rack (e.g. router, PDU, switch, PBX). To realize connectivity to the building's cabling, a patchpanel with RJ45 jacks on both sides was installed, so that the rack can be wired just as usual, and connections to the building's wiring can be established just by putting the rack next to the MDF und use a bunch of long patch cables.

Flexibility, scalability and ease of transport and setup were the main requirements in this project.

Thus, the rack-mount server runs Proxmox virtualization environment and a Debian-based linux installation providing the whole X2Go environment as one VM in it. The mix of various PCs of different ages was discarded and replaced by a number of Fujitsu thin clients of the same model.

With the help of Proxmox, administrative tasks like distribution upgrades, backup/restore/snapshots can be performed by less experienced personnell and without fear of service outage. In the long run, the classic PBX may be replaced by a Soft-PBX, and additionally, it is conceivable to provide this rack to nearby Red Cross organizations and to give them the possibility to let VMs for their needs run on the server alternatively.

Nevertheless, X2Go, in combination with X2Go-TCE provides an easy to setup remote desktop environment at no license cost. In our use case, management of clients is unnecessary and there is just one OS installation that needs to be maintained. With desktop-sharing, there is even a possibility of providing remote support directly without depending on solutions with a centralized infrastructure.

-Jens Buerger