The Questions

1. What is Recon-X?
2. What kind of remote sessions does Recon-X allow?
3. How does Recon-X compare with VNC?
4. Who needs Recon-X and why?
5. What server platforms are supported?
6. What about support for HP-UX. AIX, Slackware and other UNIX and Linux flavors? Can I still use Recon-X?
7. Do I need root access to install Recon-X on the host?
8. Do I install Recon-X on every host?
9. Does Recon-X work with any PC X server?
10. How is Recon-X licensed?
11. Does each Session require a separate Recon-X license?
12. I already have X-Win32, Exceed or Reflection X. Do I have to buy a new copy or upgrade?

The Answers

Recon-X is a revolutionary new product that adds completely new functionalities to PC X servers such as X-Win32, Hummingbird Exceed and WRQ's Reflection X:

• Suspend & Resume: You can now suspend a remote session, turn of your PC and resume the session after restarting your Windows machine.
• Crash Recovery: Whether the PC X server crashes, the Windows PC goes down, or you lose your network connections, your remote sessions stay alive and Recon-X lets you reconnect to them.
• Session Mobility: Recon-X even lets you suspend your sessions on one PC and resume them from another machine, such as in a conference room or home PC.
• High Speed: Recon-X dramatically increases PC X server performance over VPN connections, or DSL and Cable connections.

Recon-X 1 allows you to bring up a full Unix/Linux desktop (Gnome, KDE or CDE) from which you can start applications. Release 2 will add the ability to set up individual rootless x windows.

Quite well in many important ways:

• Recon-X allows you to use the PC X server of your choice (X-Win32, Exceed, Reflection X). It protects your investment in the PC X server you already have.
• VNC has limited X server functionality, such as the lack of copy & paste between X and Windows applications. Recon-X allows you to utilize the powerful PC X server functionalities of X-Win32, Exceed and Reflection X.
• VNC has problems with lagging mouse responses as well as a general "fuzzyness" for graphics images such as chip designs. Recon-X offers the same display quality you would see on the Unix/Linux console.
• Thanks to compression, Recon-X consumes very little network bandwidth. VNC sessions act as huge hogs on the network and can bring network performance to its knees.
• Recon-X comes with StarNet corporate technical and engineering support. With VNC you're on your own when you have a problem.

Anyone using a PC X Server to connect to applications that are running on a remote host. Recon-X lets you turn off your computer at the end of the day and reconnect to the application after rebooting. Not having to shut down all of your remote applications each day and bring them back up the next day will save you valuable time every day. And of course the ability to recover sessions after a crash or work effectively over slow connections vastly enhances the use of a PC X server.

Recon-X Release 1.0 can be installed on the Linux and Solaris servers:

• Sun Solaris 8, 9 & 10.
• Red Hat Enterprise 3 & 4
• Red Hat Fedora Core 3 & 4
• SuSE 9.2 & 9.3

Yes you can! Although support for other server platforms is not currently available, you can use any server based on the supported platforms and use that as the "Recon-X hub." So you connect to that machine and from there start applications on an unsupported server. Since Unix and Linux servers almost never crash, you get all of the same benefits from Recon-X, except of a bit more traffic on the network since the connections is indirect.

Yes.

Typically that is a good idea because then you can make a direct connection from the PC to that host. But you can also set up Recon-X on just one machine (such as in a server farm with many hosts), and then connect to the applications from there.

Yes, it should, even with open source ones. However, most PC X server have a number of bugs, some of which may affect the performance of Recon-X. Currently we are only aware of one major issue with Reflection X where keyboard strokes are not recognized. We are trying to determine if it is a Recon-X or Reflection- X problem.

There are no up-front licensing fees. You pay a small annual Maintenance fee per user (a user can have multiple PCs). You can also install the server packages on as many machines as you like at no additional fee.

No! Each licensed user can start as many Recon-X sessions on as many host systems as he/she wants.

No. You only have to purchase a copy of Recon-X at $79 per user per year or less, depending on volume