Teleffect by Electric Arc
Version 1.0
User's Guide

This document describes Teleffect by Electric Arc. The software and documentation are provided to you in accordance with your license agreement.

For the latest information and downloads, please see our Home Page.

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Overview
  3. Installation
  4. Configuration
  5. Use
  6. Security
  7. Advanced Information
  8. Troubleshooting
  9. Legal Information

Introduction

Welcome to Teleffect, a shared-desktop productivity tool by Electric Arc. This User's Guide is designed for users who are familiar with installing and removing software from their computer systems, and who have a basic understanding of the network configuration of their computers.

Overview

Teleffect allows you to share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers. The Teleffect software must be installed and configured on each computer where you want this sharing. The collection of all these computers running Teleffect is known as the Teleffect System (see Figure 1).


Figure 1 - A Teleffect System


Each computer in the Teleffect System plays a particular role. The computer connected to the keyboard and mouse that you will primarily use is the Teleffect Master computer. There is only one Teleffect Master in the Teleffect System. The other computers in the Teleffect System that receive their keyboard and mouse input from the Teleffect Master computer are the Teleffect Slave computers. There can be any number of Teleffect Slave computers in the Teleffect System.

NOTE: The mouse and keyboard attached to Slave computers can still be used while Teleffect is in use.

Installation

System Requirements

Teleffect has the following minimum installation requirements per platform. In addition, each computer in the Teleffect system must be assigned a network resolvable hostname or a static IP address. If you are not sure if this is the case, contact your system administrator.

Windows NT®

IRIX® 6.3, 6.4, 6.5

IRIX® 6.2 (in addition to IRIX® requirements for 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5)

Computer Setup

You must choose one machine to be the Teleffect Master. The choice of which computer to make the Master is mainly a matter of personal preference. Some factors that may help you choose one machine over another are:

Before you install, you must also setup your hardware.

You will need access to the mouse and keyboard of each of the Teleffect Slave machines during installation. After installation and configuration, you can move all but the Teleffect Master mouse and keyboard out of the way.

NOTE: The mouse and keyboard attached to Slave computers can still be used while Teleffect is in use.

Installing Software

You must install the Teleffect software on each computer that is participating as part of the Teleffect System. The software installation process is slightly different on each platform. Refer to the appropriate section below for details.

Installing on Windows®

If you have a previous version of Teleffect installed, you must uninstall it and reboot before installing a newer version or reinstalling the same version. You can check if Teleffect is already installed by going to Start->Settings->Control Panel->Add/Remove Programs and looking for "Teleffect by Electric Arc" in the scrolling list. To uninstall Teleffect, select its entry in the list and click the Add/Remove button. The installer will prompt you to uninstall a previous version of Teleffect if it detects one on your system.

The installation process for Windows® uses a standard self-extracting executable program. Depending on how you received the Teleffect program, you can launch the Setup file in one of several ways:

In addition to installing the software on your system, the Setup program also configures Teleffect for use. Below is a step-by-step guide to navigating the installation and setup process on the Windows® platform. At any point you can cancel the installation process by clicking "Cancel". If you need to go back to a previous step, you can click the "Back" button.

Installing on IRIX®

The IRIX® installation process follows standard Silicon Graphics® installation conventions. You must use the swmgr(1) (or inst(1)) tool to install the software. Depending on how you received the Teleffect inst images, you can launch swmgr in one of several ways.

Once in swmgr you need only press the "Install" button to install the software. If you would like to customize the installation, you can press the "Customize Install" button to select only particular pieces of the product for installation. We strongly recommend that you use the defaults unless you are very experienced with IRIX® software administration. After installation has completed, quit swmgr and proceed to the Configuration section of the User's Guide.

Configuration

Once Teleffect has been installed, it must be configured before it can be used. On Windows®, configuration is handled as part of the installation process. On IRIX®, configuration must be done in a separate step. On both platforms, you may need to change the configuration during normal use of Teleffect for a variety of reasons, which may include:

The configuration panel allows you to change virtually any aspect of your Teleffect installation. The settings are grouped into pages that can be viewed by clicking on the tabs along the top of the configuration tool, or by clicking the "Back" and "Next" buttons along the bottom of the page, depending on platform. Below is a step by step guide to each of the configuration pages. When you are done making changes, you must click "Apply" or "Ok" to make the changes permanent. If you want to discard your changes, you may press the "Cancel" button to exit the configuration tool without affecting Teleffect.

IRIX® Configuration

Launch the configuration tool from the Toolchest->Desktop->Customize->Teleffect menu. You can also execute the configuration tool from the command line by running /usr/sbin/teleffect.

Windows® Configuration

Go to Start->Settings->Control Panel and double click on the Teleffect icon to bring up the configuration panel. You can also use the Teleffect icon in the icon tray of the Windows® taskbar to open the configuration panel by either double clicking on the icon or right clicking and selecting the "Settings…" menu entry.

Use

Teleffect is a tool that provides a natural and transparent way to interact with multiple computers.

Startup

Teleffect should start automatically when you boot or log in to your system. If you wish to change this behavior, consult the Advanced Information section for information on how to change the startup behavior of the Teleffect service/daemon.

On startup, any temporary licensing information will be displayed, informing you of how many days are left until your license expires. If you have a permanent or pre-licensed system, no information will be displayed. When startup is complete, the pointer will jump to the center of the Teleffect Master computer's screen, and will disappear from the Teleffect Slave screens, as there is now effectively one pointer shared across all screens in the Teleffect System.

Changing Screens

To move from one screen to another, move the pointer off the edge of the screen closest to the screen of the computer you want to go to. For example, if you have a computer named Mars to the left of a computer named Saturn, and the pointer is currently on Saturn's screen, you can move the pointer left off the edge of Saturn's screen and see it appear at the same horizontal position on the right edge of Mars' screen.

You cannot change screens when you have a key or button down. This allows you to easily use scrollbars that are very close to the edge of the screen without accidentally changing screens in the process.

Cut and Paste

Teleffect provides you with a single, shared text clipboard across all the computers in the Teleffect system. You place text onto the Teleffect clipboard using the same action you would to place text onto the normal system clipboard. This clears the text selection on all other computers in the Teleffect system, and makes the new contents of the clipboard available for pasting on each computer you change screens to. It is important to remember that Teleffect cut and paste operations conform to the UI conventions of each platform. Thus, on Windows®, you can use the Edit menu to cut/copy/paste, while on IRIX® you sweep select text to copy and use the middle mouse button to paste. For example, you may have received email containing an accounting number on your Windows® computer, Mars, that you need to enter into a special finance package on your IRIX® machine, Saturn. Rather than retype the number into the program on Saturn, possibly making mistakes, you can instead select the text on Mars and choose the Edit->Copy option in your mail program. Any text you had selected on Saturn will become unselected, as the shared Teleffect text clipboard contents have changed. Then you change screens to Saturn, and click the middle mouse button over the text field where you need to enter the account number into the finance program. The text will be pasted from the Teleffect clipboard into the field without error.

Security

There have been many instances of hackers intercepting confidential information that has been transmitted across a corporate Intranet or the Internet because the sender did not take adequate security precautions. Teleffect is susceptible to such snooping attacks. For example, a hacker could monitor the network and watch for users entering a password on a Teleffect Slave machine. As the keystrokes are actually sent over the network from the Teleffect Master to the Teleffect Slave, the hacker could learn the password through careful observation. Teleffect contains an encryption option to reduce this threat. When encryption is enabled, all information between the Teleffect Master and Teleffect Slave is encrypted using the password you provide, so that a hacker without the password will only see unintelligible information being transmitted between the computers. Clearly, it is important to keep your password secret or a hacker might still be able to discover what you type.

Another potential security risk is that a hacker might somehow take control of your computer by impersonating the Teleffect Slave or Teleffect Master machine. The security option provided with Teleffect uses the password you provide to authenticate all network connections made between computers in the Teleffect System before sending or accepting any keyboard or pointer input.

The encryption algorithm used in Teleffect is 40-bit DES. The implementation is derived from the work of Peter Gutmann, Eric Young, and Colin Plumb in their implementation of the cryptlib2.0 library. The data packets sent between computers in the Teleffect System are relatively small, and thus are block chained so as to complicate any plaintext attack. The authentication protocol between computers is symmetric, in that each side requires the other to be authenticated before allowing communication to proceed. Authentication is achieved by the originator sending an 8000 bit random string to the peer. The peer must then encrypt the string using the shared secret key, and send the result back to the originator. The originator also encrypts the string and compares the result with that returned by the peer. If they match, the originator considers the peer has been authenticated. The shared secret password is never transmitted over the network, and is stored in an encrypted form on each machine.

If you would like to use Teleffect's security features, you can enable them from the Teleffect configuration tool.

Advanced Information

This section is intended for users who have special configuration needs, and who are familiar with system administration tasks on Windows NT® and IRIX® platforms.

Service/Daemon Administration

The Teleffect program runs as a background task on the computers in the Teleffect System. The mechanism for running background tasks is particular to each platform. On all platforms, you must have Administrator or root privileges to perform these tasks.

Windows NT®

Teleffect is a Win32 Service, and can be controlled from Control Panel->Services. On installation, Teleffect is configured to startup automatically. If you want to control when Teleffect starts, you can change its startup option to be Manual or Disabled. You can also stop and start the Teleffect service directly from this control panel. NOTE: when you stop the Teleffect service, all mouse and keyboard sharing will immediately terminate on the computer, and can only be restarted using the Services Control Panel or by rebooting the machine. The local mouse and keyboard attached to the machine will continue to function normally.

IRIX®

Teleffect runs as a daemon called tfxd, and may be enabled/disabled using the chkconfig(1) program. By default tfxd is enabled. Teleffect may be started manually by running the command:

/etc/config/teleffect start

and may be stopped manually by running:

/etc/config/teleffect stop

Running the Telffect configuration program will automatically stop and start tfxd as needed.

Advanced Configuration

The configuration program only allows for a Teleffect System in which there are two or three computers arranged side-by-side. These are the most common spatial relationships, and should satisfy most users. Internally, Teleffect stores each screen's position as an x,y coordinate on a cartesian grid, and thus Teleffect supports more general spatial relationships than those provided by the configuration tool.

Teleffect Master stores the screens' coordinates in a data structure called the map. The coordinates in the map are such that the x-coordinate increases to the right of the origin and the y-coordinate increases upward form the origin. Each screen occupies exactly one unit cell and a single cell can contain at most one screen. When the pointer moves off the edge of a screen, the Master consults the map to determine what cell containing an active screen is nearest to the cell containing the screen the pointer just left in the direction the pointer left that screen.

The map also provides for the concept of edge wrapping. If "horizontal wrapping" is enabled, the rightmost screen in a given row will also be treated as though it is left of the leftmost screen in that row. If "vertical wrapping" is enabled, the bottom screen in a given column will also be treated as though it is above the top screen in that column. For instance, if horizontal wrapping is enabled, a mouse motion that carries the pointer off the left-hand side of the leftmost screen will cause the mouse to enter the right-hand side of the rightmost screen on that row. If horizontal wrapping is disabled, the same motion would cause the pointer to remain on the left-hand side of the leftmost screen.

The map is stored in a different location and format on each platform.

IRIX® Format

On IRIX®, the map is stored in /etc/config/tfxd.map. The map file must begin with the following header:

#Teleffect Map 1.0

Each line which describes a screen begins with the keyword "screen" and has the following format:

screen <name> x y

In a screen declaration, name is the computer's name, it's dotted IP address in decimal, or "localhost", and x and y are its Cartesian coordinates.

Both horizontal and vertical wrapping are disabled by default. The "horizontalWrap" and "verticalWrap" options can be used to enable them. If a line begins with "horizontalWrap:", there should be exactly one other token on the line following the colon -- either "true" or "false". If a line begins with "verticalWrap:", there should be exactly one other token on the line following the colon -- either "true" or "false".

Example map file (/etc/config/tfxd.map)

#Teleffect Map 1.0

horizontalWrap: true

screen <localhost>  0 0
screen <mars>       1 0

Windows® Format

On Windows®, the map is stored in the registry under the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ElectricArcLLC\Teleffect\1.0\map

The map key contains subkeys for each screen. Each screen key contains DWORD values that describe its x and y Cartesian coordinates. The map key also contains a string value for the "version" (which must be "1.0"), and DWORD flags for "horizonalWrap" and "verticalWrap". 

Example registry settings

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ElectricArcLLC\Teleffect\0.80\server\map]
"horizontalWrap"=dword:00000001
"version"="1.0"
"verticalWrap"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ElectricArcLLC\Teleffect\0.80\server\map\localhost]
       "x"=dword:00000000
       "y"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ElectricArcLLC\Teleffect\0.80\server\map\mars]
       "x"=dword:00000001
       "y"=dword:00000000

System Log File

Teleffect logs important events to the system log file. On Windows®, the system log can be found at Start->Programs->Administrative Tools(Common)->Event Viewer. Teleffect logs both Application and System Events. On IRIX®, Teleffect logs to the syslog, which is usually located in /var/adm/SYSLOG.

On Windows®, Teleffect additionally provides short status information in the tool tip for the Teleffect icon in the Taskbar Icon tray. Position the pointer over the Teleffect icon for a few seconds to cause the tool tip to appear.

Troubleshooting

Please see the troubleshooting guide for help diagnosing problems.

Legal Information

Teleffect is copyrighted by Electric Arc LLC, and is protected by copyright law and international treaties. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of Teleffect, or any portion of it, may result in severe civil and criminal penalties, and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under the law. All rights are reserved.

The "Teleffect" name is a registered trademark with the US trademark office.

Copyright 1998 Electric Arc LLC