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Sun Microsystems Linux Business Hardware

Sun Rays For Linux 131

Posted by timothy from the shining-example dept.
Tarantolato writes "According to an eweek story Sun Microsystems will be debuting a Linux port of their Sun Ray Server at Linux World this week. This would allow Sun Ray thin clients to be run off of a SuSE or Red Hat box, where you previously needed a Solaris-SPARC setup to do that."
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Sun Rays For Linux More

Sun Rays For Linux

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:06PM (#9865565)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • ...as a server version of JDS has not yet been completed.

      Not too surprising, because JDS is intended for the desktop, and Sun already has a server OS...

    • Thats probable what most of the crowd here would use.

      Is it? Why would anybody use JDS when you have Debian (disclaimer: other dists are available)?

      SunRay (at least the no-monitor version) is a super sweet piece of kit, it was my work desktop for a year and I loved it. Up until now it has just been a shame that you have to have Solaris installed to run it.

      SunRay on Debian, yay! \o/

  • In Related News.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by njcoder ( 657816 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:18PM (#9865619)
    Sun has also anounced their Soft Ray thin client solutions [forbes.com] as well. This allows users to turn their laptop or desktop into a thinray client without buying a Sun Ray NC.

    If you've looked into Sun's Sun Ray Technology it's pretty neat. It offers a lot of features that similar windows technology does not.

    • Re:In Related News.... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > Sun has also anounced their Soft Ray thin client solutions as well.

      Uh, that's a labs project, it isn't slated to become a product.

    • Sun announces that some large Aerospace company, after replacing 10,000 of its Solaris seats with Liunx, [slashdot.org] will then replace those back with 10,000 Sun Ray machines.
    • If you've looked into Sun's Sun Ray Technology it's pretty neat. It offers a lot of features that similar windows technology does not.

      Out of curiosity, what ?

      • In Related News....A Blue Mood. (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "Out of curiosity, what ?"

        Absense of a blue screen.
      • One of the nice things is hot desking. In a demo, I've seen someone pull a smart card out of one sun ray, stick it in another and his desktop was just how he left it. The sun ray clients also don't need much configuration, unlike other solutions that need windows cd to be installed and configured. There some claims in the real world of one administrator to around 1,000 users.
        • One of the nice things is hot desking. In a demo, I've seen someone pull a smart card out of one sun ray, stick it in another and his desktop was just how he left it.

          Terminal Services does this (well, I'm assuming the RDP client can use smart cards - but it certainly maintains the desktop across sessions).

          The sun ray clients also don't need much configuration, unlike other solutions that need windows cd to be installed and configured.

          Well, this is more a matter of what you're doing. If the client is go

  • ... and Sun's potential acquisition of Novell (Score:5, Interesting)

    by otisg ( 92803 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:20PM (#9865625) Homepage Journal
    This is VERY interesting, considering there are rumours about Sun thinking about buying Novell (which recently bought SuSe). Time to hit trading accounts! :)
  • The links aren't very technical. Is it an X server?

    • Re:So what is it? (Score:3, Informative)

      by tonyr60 ( 32153 ) *
      No, it is not an X server. It has no real intelligence and is little more than a framebuffer, keyboard, mouse and smart card slot connected to a network interface.
      • Sounds similar to a VNC client. What existing Linux applications would support it?

        • Re:So what is it? (Score:2, Informative)

          by tonyr60 ( 32153 ) *
          No, it is not like a VNC client, I should have been clearer in my earlier comment. There is no processing in the terminal, it is effectively all hardware.

        • Re:So what is it? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Kenja ( 541830 )
          "Sounds similar to a VNC client."

          No, is closer to what Microsoft did with RDP

          "What existing Linux applications would support it?"

          Um, all of them?

          • Re:So what is it? (Score:3, Informative)

            by markov_chain ( 202465 )
            Actually, RDP, VNC, and SunRays *are* the same thing. Their client sides are all networked framebuffers, they just use different protocols to get the bits from the server to the client. In addition, some of them try to optimize things by adding compression, caching, and higher level drawing operations. Then, some of them add authentication features like the SunRay smartcards.

            To put it in terms of X, in a thin-client system, both the X clients and the X server are on the server side (thus the name). Howe
            • Unless I am confused, VNC does not and never did base itself off of an X server. Yes - there is an X11 to--to VNC server, but thats about it. All the other servers (for other platforms) hook into whatever windowing system used.

              Nowadays when people say VNC, they instantly think to one of the software flavors implementing the RFB protocol. Originally AT&T made the whole cute thing for... you guessed it.... thin clients with the whole protocol processed in hardware.
              • Right, the VNC protocol has nothing to do with X. I should say, the default Linux VNC *implementation* is based on an X server.

                As I recall AT&T was trying to create devices which combined the various technologies found in an average office-- a computer, a phone, video conferencing, etc.; hence, "Virtual Network Computing." Their device was a hardware VNC client (though I doubt it was really hardware; even the SunRay boxes are software based) connecting to some beefy centralized server. In the end the
            • Just think of the SunRay as "VNC in an embedded box", only the server-software connects it to X, and it has support for USB, audio, and video capture (albeit only supported by SunForum, as far as I know) Oh, and it works a lot better than VNC too. It isn't quirky, and it isn't sluggish.

    • Re:So what is it? (Score:5, Informative)

      by 0racle ( 667029 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:39PM (#9865695)
      Sun Ray [sun.com] is a Terminal Server/Thin Client thing. In addition to providing the thin client, they handle several authentication methods such as smart cards, and session management so you can detach from one thin client, authenticate on another, and resume your session as you left it.

      • Re:So what is it? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by cjsnell ( 5825 )

        They also handle audio and video. It's pretty neat (but not necessarily all that useful) to watch a movie on a SunRay, detach, log into another and see and hear the movie still playing.
      • I do this with vnc 4.0. All you have to do is edit the gdm.conf file for the Gnome Login Manager and replace X with Xvnc. Also set up a few gdm instances so that you can have multiple users logged into the same box. I put my desktop on :0 and my wife's desktop on :1. You can disable vnc's authentication so that you don't get a double password prompt (one from VNC and one from GDM). I set the screensaver to lock the desktop after 15 minutes of inactivity. So when I reconnect, my apps are right where I
      • It's like Citrix [citrix.com] but for Unix/Linux. Cool. We use Citrix on some Windows 2000 servers here at work, and feed about 50% of our 250 users off of them. Works pretty well.

        Wonder if I could get the bosses to switch 'em over to Sun Ray....

    • Re:So what is it? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by jekewa ( 751500 )
      Yes, basically.

      The SunRay appliance is a thin client that basically runs an X "client" allowing connection to remote servers. The SunRay server software (currently only available for Sparc, but as the article portends, will be ported to LINUX) provides the SunRay appliances with the information to get going (a list of login servers, for example). The appliance basically connects to a Sun server's X.

      The SunRay appliance hardware is pretty small, and individually unimpressive--which makes it kind of impre

      • Re:So what is it? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Jahf ( 21968 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:23PM (#9865888) Journal
        Not true ... the appliance is not an X client at all.

        SunRay server software keeps framebuffers for multiple X sessions on the server. Those sessions are sent over the network via a completely different protocol from X. Very similar in high-level concept to VNC.

        This allows some neat things, the neatest of which you also don't mention :) The SunRay terminals have smart card interfaces.

        To put in practical perspective (I almost skipped my Disclaimer: I work for Sun here since it should be painfully obvious), my employee ID badge is a smartcard that I can use for entrance to the building. When I get to my terminal I can plug that smartcard in before I log in. If I want to walk away, I pull my card and my session stays open on the server, but not on the terminal. I can walk to any other terminal in the building, plug it in, and my session pops onto the terminal. I can leave things running in the session, since it never dies. I don't -have- to use my smartcard. I can log in without it, but I lose portability for that session.

        It is quite cool.

        Now of course the OS needs support for smartcard stuff, so the easiest way -today- is to use Solaris SPARC, but put the smartcard framework on Linux and use the Linux SunRay Server software and voila, portable network Linux sessions (as you mentioned, but pointing out the portability).

        Additionally, the SunRay terminals have USB connectors and audio. With proper support (it's being worked on) these will really enhance things.

        There are other neat things that I really wanna talk about, but can't ... they know my ID here ;)

        • There are other neat things that I really wanna talk about, but can't ... they know my ID here ;)

          Ha! I know what you're talking about. I stopped going to the SunLabs Open Houses 'cause it filled my head with things that I cannot talk about.

        • Re:So what is it? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Albanach ( 527650 )
          Well one question - what about folk that want to work from home? Roadwarrior and executive types with a laptop who might work fro home in the evening or at the weekend? Does this work over DSL or is that way to slow? Is there any way for an exec to sync their files to a laptop when leaving the building and resync when getting back in the morning?
        • What is it with SUN and keyboards? I've gotten used to every SUN I'm working with having yet another keyboard layout, but the SunRays really push that inconvenience to the limit: someone decided it would be cool to switch the control and the Caps Lock keys.

          Perhaps it's possible to reconfigure that (any pointers appreciated) or to use another keyboard - but really: why doesn't SUN switch to PC keyboards already and stops punishing their users?

          Just curious. :-)

          • Sun sells both the "US" layout and the "US Unix" layout. You have the Unix layout, which I actually prefer (as an occasional emacs user).

            Modern Sun systems (any Blade or Sun Ray) use standard USB. You can swap that keyboard with anything you want -- I use a MS Natural Pro with my SunRay. They are similarly agnostic about mice, and the newest builds of Mozilla from Sun actually support the wheel (finally).

            The only limitation is that a few of the older systems (at least the Blade 100) require that the k

      • Re:So what is it? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Sesse ( 5616 ) <sgunderson@big[ ]t.com ['foo' in gap]> on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:33PM (#9865940) Homepage

        The most impressive part of the Sunrays is definitely that they don't feel like thin clients. Things zap around like as if you were on a local computer -- in contrast, a terminal server running Windows feels extremely sluggish, even with a powerful server and dedicated thin clients (which is basically what you have with the Sunrays :-) ).

        /* Steinar */

        • The most impressive part of the Sunrays is definitely that they don't feel like thin clients. Things zap around like as if you were on a local computer -- in contrast, a terminal server running Windows feels extremely sluggish, even with a powerful server and dedicated thin clients [...]

          Your TS or your local client is severely misconfigured. I'm usually RDPed into several machines during the day and they feel no less responsive than a local display.

          • Funny, I've tested a lot (well, at least several) of different RDP solutions, from multiple different clients (both rdesktop, Microsoft's own Remote Desktop Client and dedicated RDP thin clients) to multiple different servers (both Windows XP machines and dedicated Win2000/Win2003 terminal servers), and most of these are just painful to work with, even when I'm virtually alone on the server. (The machines are also mostly administrated by different people, so if there is a severe misconfiguration it must obv

            • Funny, I've tested a lot (well, at least several) of different RDP solutions, from multiple different clients (both rdesktop, Microsoft's own Remote Desktop Client and dedicated RDP thin clients) to multiple different servers (both Windows XP machines and dedicated Win2000/Win2003 terminal servers), and most of these are just painful to work with, even when I'm virtually alone on the server. (The machines are also mostly administrated by different people, so if there is a severe misconfiguration it must obv

        • Completely silent (Score:5, Interesting)

          by AmicoToni ( 123984 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @10:40PM (#9866398)
          There is another scarcely mentioned, but equally great feature of the Sunray stations: they have no fans!!
          If you think that is no big deal, enter your standard computer lab again and pay attention to all the noise... I have worked in a large institution where the whole building was Sunray-based. A completely silent computing environment. You can actually hear the birds chirping outside. You have no idea what it feels like until you've tried it!!

        • Re:So what is it? (Score:3, Informative)

          by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) *
          The most impressive part of the Sunrays is definitely that they don't feel like thin clients. Things zap around like as if you were on a local computer

          Yeah, but you need a dedicated 100Mbps switched network for your SunRays.

          Other protocols may fair better under similar configurations.

          Don't get me wrong, they're Frosted Flakes great, but it's not for free.
          • You can use it over public networks as well now. That functionality has been there for a while now. It initially required a dedicated 100mbs network, but that requirement is no longer there. You may be able to use it over the internet as well over DSL and/or cable.
            • Ah, that's good to know. Do you know if they've changed protocols as well? i.e. did they drop the requirement because it was no longer necessary or because it was a hard sell? At the time they protocol could peak to a significant percentage of the hundred megabits.
              • SRSS 2.0 got quite a bit lighter, rumors say that the next version will work acceptably well over a DSL-speed connection. ;)
                • I don't think they are rumors as I've seen customer demonstrations. The even sent over a VP from Sun to the customer site and had him plug in a SunRay (outside their firewall, of course) and pull up his Sun work session over the internet. I'm told it was a t1 drop, but still over the internet with no performance hit that we could see. That's my kind of "working from home".
                  The implications go far beyond that. That's the kind of easy system my grandma could use. No equipment on the user side except SunRa

        • I'm using a Sun Ray right now (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I work everyday on a Sun ray. I'm running KDE 3.2.2 on a Solaris Ultra Sparc III. It certainly does not feel like being at a local machine, but it's not far off. We're on a gigabit network here. Sometimes if somebody is bogging down the network, it becomes unusable, but that's pretty rare.

          Overall, I think I would rather use a Sun ray simply because of the silence. The constant sound of a high performance PC with 3+ fans in it gets to me after a while.
          • Overall, I think I would rather use a Sun ray simply because of the silence.

            The fact that the SunRay server might be an SMP box with FibreChannel disks and gobs of RAM doesn't hurt either :) In fact, there is a distinct possibility that SunRay could actually be better than a local desktop (except for OpenGL work, of course).
            • Actually, here's an interesting tidbit I've observed first-hand. It seems some 2D graphics operations (such as scrolling in a web browser) actually feel signifigantly *faster* on a SunRay than on the local framebuffer of a Sun Workstation.

              I think this stems from the fact that once upon a time, Sun said "Our new UPA interconnect is so great, these new UPA cards no longer need the 2D acceleration hardware we had in the old TurboGX". (might have made sense at the time, but today it means that those cards ar

        • Re:So what is it? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by bolind ( 33496 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @02:48AM (#9867282) Homepage
          The most impressive part of the Sunrays is definitely that they don't feel like thin clients. Things zap around like as if you were on a local computer

          You have obviously never been to the Technical University of Denmark, or the CS Department of Copenhagen University.

          Those places, especially DTU, almost soil them selves from the sheer joy of deploying hundreds of SunRay thin clients. Problem is, people want their browser, their java apps, their animated gifs and (shudder) their Xitrix Windows sessions.

          End result is a very thin client like experience. When I matriculated in 2000, we had a large, bad Sun server (24CPU/24Gig IIRC). This has now been demoted to lowly X-server, and it still runs slow as mollasses.

          I think SunRay is a kickass technology, I would love to have one on my desk, quiet, cold, connected to a powerful Linux server in the basement. And I would love to see them in action where there was sufficient power for a good user experience.

          I totally understand the Universities that deploy them. A three man team and a bunch of cable plugging monkeys can administrate a four digit seat deployment. But the fact of the matter is that users, in my experience, tend to find other alternatives (the Windows Lab, bring their own laptops.), because the responsiveness is so low.

          Well, I'm ranting, and it's pre-coffee, so it's probably coming out a little more bitter than it should. This news about SunRays being able to run off linux is good news in my world, as this will allow administrators to buy very powerful commodity hardware at a fraction of the price of Sun iron.

    • Re:So what is it? (Score:5, Informative)

      by spinozaq ( 409589 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:52PM (#9866045)
      I actually did an undergrad project reverse engineering these little things. Now, (not then) there are a few web sites online that have info on how they operate. Like someone said, very similar to VNC, The protocol is actually called THIN. There is a short paper from Sun on the protocol. It mentions how they ran quake 2 on it. There are a few extra auth tricks as well. For instance, after it gets a DHCP lease it expects to keep a TCP connection open to the server forever more, and do nothing with it by keep alives. Everything else is UDP packets. We had nearly 100 of these running off a single 8 way V880 server using a gigabit switch to feed dedicated 100t lines to each ray.
      My goal was to write a server in Java that could at least auth and issue a few commands, draw a rectangle, draw an image. They actually send images and image change data in ascii pixel maps. I was impressed.
      The coolest feature for college anyway was the smartcards. They could store your session key and you could go to any other ray and use the card to bring back the screen right where you left off.
      • What do you mean by "They actually send images and image change data in ascii pixel maps. I was impressed."?
      • Whatever happened with that project? I dug around all over the internet looking for something similiar since I picked one up, and I'll be damned if I could find anything that would even initialize the darn thing, much less draw to the screen.

    • Re:So what is it? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mikael ( 484 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @09:25PM (#9866180)
      The idea of Sun Rays is to save sysadmin's the hassle of fighting viruses/trojans/spamware/malware by constantly having to clean hard disk drives. The thin client has no hard disk drive; everything is downloaded off the network. It's like an X-server which can handle audio, video and 3D graphics. Access is gained by using ID cards.

      Corporate customers were complaining about the cost of maintaining PC networks. Sun saw there was demand for low-cost multimedia terminals (companies still wanted to their staff to be able to view training videos) which would have access to a centralised server.

      • Thin-client computing harkens back to ye olden days when the computer administrators were able to actually administer the system. These days, everyone has a system on their desktop that could double as a server, and ends up running so much malware/spyware/etc that they become hobbling pieces of crud that bog down their networks.

        I would prefer a thin-client solution at my office for a few reasons. 1) Noise, 2) heat, 3) I might actually have a decent response system. The main issue that I have to face howeve

  • Assault and Battery Lawsuit Pending? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tony Freakin Twist ( 673681 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:39PM (#9865697)
    Against whomever smacked Sun with the ClueStick(tm)
  • I bought two Sun Ray terminals on eBay, thinking they were standard X terminals.

    Now I can actually make use of them.

    I hope.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • This is GREAT news! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @09:29PM (#9866200)
    Kudos Sun!

    I for one am extremely happy if this goes through as planned. Hopefully, Sun will not charge for the server software and only cash in on Sunray sales.

    In a not so distant past, we fell on the following website [cam.ac.uk] of a university student's project to reverse engineer the sunray protocol. Our only hope (out of expensive SPARC gear) was that this guy's project would work out in the end. I guess this won't be needed anymore, at least not with the perspective of simply running the thing of a lintel box.

    Our environment at work is composed exclusively of Sunrays, approximately 25 of them to be accurate. When we close in the 20 concurrent user, it gets pretty bogged down, especially with our venerable quad cpu E450.

    Shelling out money for a better Sparc-Sunray-driving-server was not desired, mainly because of the price (a 4-way V880 costs 10-20 times the price of a quad opteron, and doesn't perform nearly as well). In other words, were stuck with the current setup. The least we could do was to run Mozilla and related apps of a separate Linux X86 box and X11 forward everything. Still, driving the graphical environment for 20 users tends to bring the machine to a crawl once in a while.

    For those who will ask, connecting through XDMCP on a Linux box to drive the environment was even worse: those little XSun processes would eat up to a single CPU under heavy usage of the desktop, and it would feel pretty slugish. Understandable, since the screen refreshes would go LinuxBox -> Sunray server -> Sunray (one hop too many).

    Enough said: I am thrilled with this piece of news. Sun has made my day (and I haven't said that in a LONG while). Running Sunray enterprise software on a quad x86 box is a dream come true.
    • Hopefully, Sun will not charge for the server software and only cash in on Sunray sales.

      As making money off the hardware has always been SUN's business model, this is a very strong possibility.
    • Just out of interest, why didn't you consider using a low cost box like a V240 or V440? A quad V440 can be less than 20K.

      I agree though that it will be nice to see Sun Ray available for Linux. It'll make the entry costs lower, particularly if all you're using the Sun Ray server for is to manage the Sun Ray network and displays, with all apps being run on Windows app servers, a fairly typical deployment for most businesses.

      For users who are happy with a Solaris/Linux desktop it's also good news. You can

    • I don't get the appeal. I've used 'em, and I like the zero-admin aspect of thin clients. But I've been doing the same with diskless X Terminals for 10 years, and lately, diskless net-booting FreeBSD boxes. Like the SunRay, something like a diskless VIA EPIA is silent and zero-admin: it just works, has access to all the stuff on the boot/NFS server. Any such machine in the house has access to the same stuff, like the SunRay does.

      Oh, I don't have a "smartcard" to store my stuff on like the SunRays do. Gues

      • Re:This is GREAT news! (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        From an administration perspective, they're interchangable parts. If you have a sunray die, you drop another one in place, punch in the smartcard (which has no storage, btw) and you have your old session back with no lost data. Not so if an old diskless X terminal keels over. The software also handles load balancing for the session servers (and may handle failover with Sun Cluster, not sure about that.)

        The smartcard is just a cryptographic session token so that the server can uniquely identify a user, n

  • We have read about the possible opening of the Solaris operating system. Opening up some of the technology involved is a nice step but falls short in my eyes. I think that sun should come out with a new open version of Solaris that is fully compatible with the current version but integrates some flavor of BSD. (I am personally favorable to UNIX) Just a thought...

    • Re:Opening Solaris? (Score:4, Informative)

      by multipartmixed ( 163409 ) * on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @01:26AM (#9867079) Homepage
      > I think that sun should come out with a new open version of Solaris that is fully
      > compatible with the current version but integrates some flavor of BSD.

      How would that be more beneficial than simply opening up the current sources? What parts of BSD would you include? Certainly, you don't mean the kernel, because you want full Solaris compatibility.

      Oh, wait, you must be one of *those*.

      Here's how to transform your Solaris box into a BSD box:

      1. Install gcc and gnu make packages from sunfreeware.com
      2. usermod -s /bin/csh cow007
      3. Add this to your .cshrc: "setenv PATH=/usr/ucb:$PATH"
      4. Add this to all Makefiles: LOADLIBES += -lbsdmalloc -lucb

      That oughta do it.

    • I think that sun should come out with a new open version of Solaris that is fully compatible with the current version but integrates some flavor of BSD.

      Solaris does integrate some flavour of BSD - SunOS. The predecessor to Solaris was BSD based, as Suns founders were ex-Berkeley people who had worked on Unix. When Sun bought a license for SVR4 from USL (or it may have still been AT&T at the time), they integrated much of the extra bits that their BSD version of Unix had.

      Now if they open sourced it,

  • Yeah, some more sun rays wouldn't hurt the pale linux crowd.

  • Excellent! We're struggling with XPe thin clients! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by csoto ( 220540 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @11:07AM (#9868879)
    We're currently evaluating Windows XP Embedded thin clients from Wyse, Neoware and HP. They leave a lot to be desired. Not only do you still have a lot of the vulnerabilities and management hassles of Windows, you also have to deal with the weird, difficult to install, generally PITA management software they require. Plus, they're not cheap - about $600 each, without monitor!

    Sun Rays have always been very interesting, but up until this, they have only had a Solaris server. Not bad for general browsing and business apps, but we need something that can run MPEG4 stream players, and Solaris isn't the first place to look for that. Linux has solutions, however. This is something we will look into...

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