General parameters

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The general parameters are a group of parameters that govern very basic operating system and management related features. In NoTouch Center, these are part of the "Admin" parameter group.

  • Locale. A locale is definition of region- and language-based specifics. It typically includes language, date format, currency symbol, time format, etc. In a VDI world the locale has much less value on the client than it had on regular PCs - it's the Windows OS on the server side that the end user is interacting with most of the time. The default value is English (US) which translatest to the default POSIX C locale.
  • Locale character set. The character set defines the way how characters that are not part of the 7-bit-ASCII set (i.e. basically all foreign-language symbols) are handled. Traditionally computers have used ISO 8859, but in the late 2000s Unicode became standard, and UTF-8 became the default encoding. There is not much reason to switch this back to ISO 8859 unless you are executing a program that requires the system in ISO 8859 mode. All modern Citrix, RDP, VMWare, etc clients are fine with the UTF-8 default.
  • Location. The location of the system. This will be shown in NoTouch Center and makes assigning systems to groups easier.
  • Owner. The name of the system's owner. This won't be shown publicly.
  • Description. Any sort of description. This won't be shown publicly.
  • Administrator password. The administrator password protects NoTouch's configuration application. Without knowing this password you can not modify settings of the system.

Environment

Environment variables are key/value pairs in a notation of VARIABLENAME=VALUE. Both the Windows and the UNIX/Linux operating system families use environment variables, in the same fashion.

In standard operation, there is no reason to change or add environment variables. However, some programs might be behave differently if certain environment variables are set. In other words, if somebody tells you "for this feature you need to set A=B", then this parameter block is the way to go.

While on the client you have to add multiple key/value pairs, in NoTouch Center the parameter is already there, and it accepts multiple entries as comma-separated key/value-pairs, such as A=B,X=Y

Local Login

Local login refers to a (rarely used) way to enter user credentials to the local system and have the local system cache them and then apply them to started connections. The point about this is, that NoTouch can check these credentials against FTP, HTTP and HTTPS servers and if these are not valid, the login will be rejected. In other words, this can provide an AD-like login without making the endpoint a member of Active Directory (AD) or without making the user database available to the client.

  • Mode. Select the way (protocol) how the credentials are checked.
  • Server. Domain name or IP address of the system the check will be run against.
  • Default Domain. For domain-based authentication, this is the default domain. Supply your "usual" AD domain here.

As of time of writing we do not recommend using this feature. Most connection brokers/VDI products have proper login procedures and it is better to use the native Citrix, VMware, RDP, ... login directly.