An Introduction to MOBILE Lab Sessions

Sessions are a central concept of using MOBILE Lab. Sessions are local directories, accessible to the MOBILE Lab Client and Presenter applications, that may be dedicated to a workshop, classroom lab environment, project, or another purpose. For instance, a session dedicated to coding workshop may contain all necessary starter files that need to be distributed to attendees.

While sessions exist as local directories within the /opt/mobile/sessions directory, through use of the MOBILE Lab software, sessions also represent a network of machines that opt-in to share and receive data. Thus, in both the MOBILE Client and MOBILE Presenter applications, users can choose a to 'connect' to a session. When 'connected' to a session on MOBILE Client, that machine grants all machines running the Presenter software on that same session (on the same LAN) the ability to modify the contents of its local session directory.

[The Presenter software can modify its Clients' session directories by sync operations, sending files, or additional user-defined actions]

It's entirely up to you, but since MOBILE Lab can support as many sessions as the number of directories in the /opt/mobile/sessions folder, we suggest sessions are focused to a particular project, workshop, class, or general idea. Also, depending on your particular use case, you may have a need or desire to include larger files in a session. When working locally, this is no problem. However, if you wish to sync your N GB session folder with 20 clients, there is a problem. In this case, it may be useful to consider including these files in a session cloned to an external hard drive or explore whether or not the 'Execute' on client option of the Presenter's 'Send File' action can alleviate network traffic concerns.