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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
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.
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."
Against whomever smacked Sun with the ClueStick(tm)
Only if it can render 503 errors!
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 impressive. The SunRay appliance boots entirely from flash, so they're quiet and light. The small processors make them generate little heat, as well.
They behave similar to something like PXES or the myriad of other thin client solutions. That software turns your system into a remote workstation for any xdm server. That works on any Intel system (maybe there are ports?_ from floppy, USB, flash, TFTP...
An interesting thing is, if you have a LINUX box running xdm, you can use the SunRay appliance as a remote thin client for that server. You still need a SunRay server to get the appliance to behave on the network first, though.
End the FUD
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.
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.
No, is closer to what Microsoft did with RDP
"What existing Linux applications would support it?"
Um, all of them?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
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 */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
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). However, the X server doesn't draw pixels on a locally installed video card, but on the remote thin client. In fact, both Sunray and VNC use a modified X server to do this.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
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.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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!!
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I work everyday on a Sun ray. I'm running KDE 3.2.2 on a Solaris Ultra Sparc III. It certainly does not feel like being at a local machine, but it's not far off. We're on a gigabit network here. Sometimes if somebody is bogging down the network, it becomes unusable, but that's pretty rare.
Overall, I think I would rather use a Sun ray simply because of the silence. The constant sound of a high performance PC with 3+ fans in it gets to me after a while.
If you actually look at pricing between the Sun Ray's vs someone like Dell, with required software like Antivirus and Ghost (for a larger networking environment) and add them all together, you'll see that you're wrong. Don't believe me? Price 40 machines at the small to mid level business pricing bracket at Dell, Gateway, Compaq/HP, IBM, etc with Enterprise licenses of Ghost and Antivirus and you'll find that you actually save money by buying the Sun Building blocks.
As for portability - sun also has a laptop version of these things with wireless capability. Oh yea, they have batteries that actually last 6-8 hours compared to your normal laptops...
Just another AC thats shooting their mouth off on something they know nothing about...
"Out of curiosity, what ?"
Absense of a blue screen.
maybe we were just lucky, but we were running them over port-based vlans just fine. cisco 2924s, so it's not like they were high end switches. we also had a few hanging off an unmanaged switch (which was uplinked to one of the 2924s). this was about 18 months ago. over 10M was ok ... 100M was much better though
vodka, straight up, thank you!
> I think that sun should come out with a new open version of Solaris that is fully
/bin/csh cow007 .cshrc: "setenv PATH=/usr/ucb:$PATH"
> 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
3. Add this to your
4. Add this to all Makefiles: LOADLIBES += -lbsdmalloc -lucb
That oughta do it.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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