141 points by jandeboevrie13 days ago | 51 comments
How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
This is so great to see. I (like many!) have fond memories of Sun Ray. For me (and I suspect for others) Sun Ray will always represent the best of Sun -- and (of course!) some of the company's unrealized potential.
As an aside on Sun Ray, it played a very important (if incidental) role in the development of DTrace in that one of the first truly production systems we used DTrace on was a Sun Ray server inside of Sun that was in a huge amount of pain. (I described this in the DTrace USENIX paper[0], and also in my "Dtrace (sic) Review" talk at Google ca. 2007.[1])
We had hundreds of them. Fantastic technology, really secure and reliable. Wish I had saved a few, threw them all out shortly after Oracle acquired Sun. Moved to HP and Dell thin clients with VDI. All the problems and patches and maintenance of that environment paid for a really big new house for me, lots of overtime. Thanks Microsoft/HP/Dell/VMware!
Interesting to see it all play out through the post.. OpenIndiana is virtualized, the Sun Ray connects to it and runs like a thin client.
I hadn't heard of "Sun Ray" until today, but it reminds me a lot of the idea behind Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) - which I used on our school's IT lab back then at a teen. Set up an old i386 machine with the various netbooting daemons. Then on each host - boot from floppy disk, remove disk, insert in next machine until 20 hosts were running from that poor old hard drive.
The nice thing was that the installed OS on each was unaffected, and each machine was running X11 over the network.
Seems like those solutions were optimising for a time where hardware was overly expensive.
We used to have these at my workplace and always wanted to get one but they got thrown out and I didn’t manage to save one… And nowadays they are kind of rare to find on used marketplaces.
I should buy a SunRay and 3D scan it. They're still around, and These shapes should not be that hard to 3D print (does any filament maker out there color match that beautiful Sun Microsystems purple?), and this would make an amazing case for an SBC. And scaling it up for mini-ITX would be friggin hilarious too.
I'm a huge Sun dork, so I play around with OI every now and then.. but every time I try to use OI in libvirt I have a problem where the display is cut off. This only happens when using resolutions bigger than 1024x768, and if you mouse over to that area the screen will shift over to the missing bit, so it's sort of usable.. but maddening haha.
I'm pretty sure I can see the same thing happening in the picture of the sunray client they have on this page. The left hand side of the screen is cut off (you should see the clock and syspanel icons on the top left).
If I'm understanding you correctly, you have access to the entire desktop but some of it is off-screen at any given time, with the displayed area following the mouse?
This is a feature that some graphical desktops used to have back when 640x480 and 800x600 monitors were still common, the desktop resolution could be set independently of the display resolution, so you could have a larger framebuffer that your monitor presented a view in to. I recall some graphics drivers (Matrox for sure) added this to Windows 9x and called it "virtual desktop" and I know I've seen it on a few *nix platforms too.
I'd assume if the resolution adjustments work as expected below 1024x768 that whatever graphics driver OI is using in your VM only sees the virtual display as capable of 1024x768 at max and so it does this if directed to provide a larger desktop.
That's not really a "feature" in any meaningful sense -- it was a workaround for underpowered display hardware. Calling it intentional design gives too much credit. The real issue here is that libvirt's virtual GPU doesn't expose proper display geometry to the guest, which is a driver bug, not a nostalgic quirk.
That display shifting behavior is Pan-and-Scan mode from the X11 days. SGI did the same thing with IRIX on low-res framebuffers in the mid-90s. Annoying then, annoying now. The framebuffer geometry mismatch between the hypervisor's virtual GPU and what OI negotiates never quite lines up.
Fond memories of buying cheap Sun gear around 2005-2007. I had an E4500, Blade 1000, and a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 that I ran Solaris 10/11 on along with a couple of Sun Rays. Used the Blade 1000 as a Sun Ray server and it was a great experience. Glad to see it is still alive and kicking in some form.
So many good memories. My "year in industry" was watchmoor park in the UK, first 3 months spent running around sun's fancy new offices replacing all the burnt out Sunrays.
Still think they've not been matched for ease of "start a session, walk away, carry on somewhere else" as if you've never left your desk.
Tangentially related, if anyone has Sun nostalgia but only a bit, find a Sun Type 6 USB keyboard on eBay and plug it in. Great keyboard for a Mac. Unfortunately, the left-hand function keys (Stop, Again, Props, etc.) do not emit any usable keycodes. But everything else works.
I worked for a meat works that had Sunrays on all the corporate desktops and the IT manager (in a department of 3 supporting a billion dollar business) made the decision to move Sunrays off the clunky Solaris 10 CDE onto... Ubuntu Dapper Drake. My predecessor had worked out how to get all the bits running and we had Ubuntu on Sunray!
I used to have a stack of those login cards from the Sun courses I took. (I think they gave them to us to to log in to the "attendance" system, but really they were just souvenirs to show your coworker when you got back.) They sat on my desk and were a marvelous kind of fidget device, like shuffling a very scanty deck of cards over and over.
I bought a gen 2 SunRay in the hopes that I'd get around to installing it in my LAN some day as part of my eternal To-Do list. Sadly, I trashed all of that stuff when Sun got eaten and Solaris turned into a niche tech that I was almost embarrassed to have on my resume. I wish I had that stuff now.
Thank you for submitting this link, and (if they come by here) thanks to the author for writing up such a lovely, nostalgic bit of work.
The login cards were the killer feature on them(at the time). I managed a fleet of them things spread all over 4 buildings. Being able to work in one location, get up and goto another and just pickup what you were doing was INSANE in that day and age. Slapping in a keycard do it all was unheard of.
We had citrix and sunray in those days. Citrix was for those that had BIG BIG BIG money and needed windows. We were a java shop, so it was either an e450 in the server room and sunrays, or ultra5s at every desk.
Minor nitpick: Sun Ray isn't really a thin client -- it's a stateless appliance with zero local processing. Sun was pretty emphatic about that distinction. Though even Oracle eventually gave up and just called them thin clients in the docs, so maybe the battle was lost either way.
As an aside on Sun Ray, it played a very important (if incidental) role in the development of DTrace in that one of the first truly production systems we used DTrace on was a Sun Ray server inside of Sun that was in a huge amount of pain. (I described this in the DTrace USENIX paper[0], and also in my "Dtrace (sic) Review" talk at Google ca. 2007.[1])
[0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8