Slashdot Mirror
Sun Rays For Linux
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."
Wonder how long until thats available? Thats probable what most of the crowd here would use.
Sun Ray 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.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Not true ... the appliance is not an X client at all.
:) The SunRay terminals have smart card interfaces.
... they know my ID here ;)
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
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
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
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.
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 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.