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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.
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.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
This is VERY interesting, considering there are rumours about Sun thinking about buying Novell (which recently bought SuSe). Time to hit trading accounts! :)
Simpy
The links aren't very technical. Is it an X server?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Against whomever smacked Sun with the ClueStick(tm)
Only if it can render 503 errors!
So it is, wonder when they put that there. For what its worth, it only takes about 5 seconds if you type "SunRay Server Software" into Google. Guess I have no reason not to get my CompactPCI Ultrasparc server running then.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I bought two Sun Ray terminals on eBay, thinking they were standard X terminals.
Now I can actually make use of them.
I hope.
Well this is interesting. Sun needs to do something pretty drastic to keep their market share and keep the revenue coming in.
At the moment at the large educational/research facility where I work, all our Solaris Sparc boxes are going the way of the dodo (so long Sun). FreeBSD (and not Linux) is slated to be the replacement.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I'm thinking it's some sort of failed attempt at bandwidth limiting...
I can load the main page, but if I try to reload or go to any of the toplevel section pages, it 503s on me, but I can follow any of the links to stories, it works just fine.
That doesn't make it suck any less, however.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
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.
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!!
It's pretty bad when slashdot gets slashdotted.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
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...
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
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.
Can't we get one of these mod options?
If anything, buying Novell and thus SUSE, would indemnify all the SUSE users against SCO since Sun has a defined relationship with SCO allowing use of any SCO unix works. This might even put a crimp in some of SCO's complaints against IBM since they use SUSE.
Yeah -- I work for Sun but I don't drink the Kool Aide.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
You have a CompactPCI sparc server you weren't using? That would make it an enterprise server (3800, 4800, 4810, 6800). I'll give you just about any x86 linux box you want in exchange for it. I'll even throw in a copy of SUSE! :)
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
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.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
If you actually look at pricing between the Sun Ray's vs someone like Dell, with required software like Antivirus and Ghost (for a larger networking environment) and add them all together, you'll see that you're wrong. Don't believe me? Price 40 machines at the small to mid level business pricing bracket at Dell, Gateway, Compaq/HP, IBM, etc with Enterprise licenses of Ghost and Antivirus and you'll find that you actually save money by buying the Sun Building blocks.
As for portability - sun also has a laptop version of these things with wireless capability. Oh yea, they have batteries that actually last 6-8 hours compared to your normal laptops...
Just another AC thats shooting their mouth off on something they know nothing about...
"Out of curiosity, what ?"
Absense of a blue screen.
maybe we were just lucky, but we were running them over port-based vlans just fine. cisco 2924s, so it's not like they were high end switches. we also had a few hanging off an unmanaged switch (which was uplinked to one of the 2924s). this was about 18 months ago. over 10M was ok ... 100M was much better though
vodka, straight up, thank you!
i like the idea of these a *lot*. have you got a part number for one? if they do a winged variety it'd solve all my rollout headaches in one fell swoop...
Add the cost of support and you save even more. I once did a cost analysis for a fictional 1000 desktop enterprise. The outcome was basicaly that because of the lower wage and benfit costs for desktop support personel, the _entire_ hardware/software license cost (including some massive Sun servers) was recouped in ONE year. The next three years of the write off, we are talking a couple of million saved each year.
Now tell me if they are really that expensive. I think not. If a Linux server version does come out and works properly, I might be very tempted to scatter a couple of these around the house.
Not sure what the pricing is like now, but I looked into buying 50 of them at one point. In the UK it was going to cost me around £500 per station, plus of course the extra beef the servers needed (our network was ok so at least I didn't need to upgrade that). I couldn't justify the cost in comparison to PCs, which we were buying at arouns £1k at the time; for £500 extra the PC could be repurposed as a build machine, a test server, or whatever a project needed; they also came with 40Gb of disk, which would have cost us $$$ on the server. We could also save on PCs by not buying a new monitor for each PC replaced.
User's PCs weren't backed up, everyone had space on the servers which was raided and backed up; the cost of providing that much disk space, and backing it up, with the Sunray solution was prohibitive, and it would have been a single point of failure.
In the end, while it was cool, there were too many down sides. If I had been buying for a faily homogenous 'office' population, instead of developers, it would have been a closer-run thing.
I've been using sunrays on 10 Mbit hubs shared with computers without hassle since before the 2.0 version of the software. Of course it's not supported by Sun but it works, and pretty well on top of that.
Yeah, some more sun rays wouldn't hurt the pale linux crowd.
Free as in mason.
Yeah, the support on the client-end for the hardware should be practically nothing. Heck, the user could replace a broken unit. You just plug a new one in. No configuration whatsoever on the client-end.
You only compared hardware prices. Throw in the cost of PC software (including all the support software like Ghost, Antivirus, etc) plus the extra maintenance of having to package software for deployment, and a SunRay solution suddenly is surprisingly cheap.
You don't have an entire PC image per user on the server, silly person. User directories run 1-2GB each. The system software is shared across all users. You can get away with 200GB RAID-1 for 50 users without any trouble. Get a V880 with 12x FCAL slots and you have in-box growth up to 1TB easily.
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. :-)
Actually, SunRay 2.0 allows you to run on a non-dedicated LAN. It can even use the general environment DHCP instead of the SRSS built in one. I've also heard about hardware data compression being built into the next gen of these things, so that you can run em across lower bandwidth lines (DSL etc). High latency can still grind these things to unusability, tho...
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
There were a few boards tossed around, but not sold as end-user products by Sun. There's a couple of other companies that made them.
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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...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Doesn't anybody read the freakin' articles? Jebus.
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Just another AC thats shooting their mouth off on something they know nothing about
1. Sunrays are not well received in the marketplace. Anonymous or not, there is no argument there. Rather than pretend that the marketplace is full of idiots who just need to see the light, sun should think about WHY sunrays are a failure and what they could do differently with other products to prevent future failures of this magnitude. That is the kind of thing I say when I want to shoot my mouth off.
2. Sunrays and tadpoles, regardless of how niftyness, are mutually exclusive. You can't use one with the other, so you have yourself a red herring there.
3. Sun is having their lunch eaten by linux, not by a bunch of dell/gateway/antivirus crap. Sunrays are expensive compared to linux on a 1999 era pentium telnetted to a server with the DISPLAY variable set. These are way cheaper and fairly simple to administer but no one wants them either.
Next time you see this anonymous coward, we'll be having a little chat about Java.
Not true. The 6800 allowed for using either a 8 slot PCI I/O assy or a 6 slot cPCI assy. Since there were 4 I/O assemblys, you could mix, but no one does. The Sun System Handbook on sunsolve.sun.com can confirm this. Actually, the WCI I/O boats have cPCI slots as well. The are two slots for paroli cards and two cPCI slots bookending the Parolis.
I am not sure which netra the poster was referring to, but I don't doubt it. There is a lot of netra crap that I don't care to remember.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
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