Setting up a Sun Ray 150

Unboxing a complete new old stock Sun Ray 150 thin client from Sun Microsystems. This machine came out in 2000 and was a relatively early Sun Ray in the lineup. We'll unbox it, get a Sun Fire V240 setup as the server, and see if we can get it working.

Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

#netro #retrotech #retrocomputer #computers #networking

Rack stuff

Video gear

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00:00 Intro
02:35 Unboxing the Sun Ray 150
04:05 Odd Connection to JonBenét Ramsey
14:12 First Power On
19:10 Looking at a Sun Fire V240
24:22 Racking up the V240
25:44 The Sun Ray Server Software with a Sun Ray 2
28:08 Trying to get it working
31:12 Looking at a Sun Ray 270
33:27 Next Steps

[arnemartt]

Solaris/CDE on Sun Rays was peak computing, we will never have anything this perfect again

[DrCoolHands]

That rail alignment tool is actually very important. You got very lucky that you installed the rails parallel. Sun used sliders with very tight tolerances and if they weren't sufficiently aligned, they would pop apart when loading the server; causing hundreds of ball bearings to fly everywhere and often dropping the server as well.

[xbelthesarx]

With how old that Ethernet cable is, I'd check your switch for what negotiated link speed is and/or swap that cable. Wholly possible that it's gotten brittle being in that coiled orientation in the bag for years and you've got a broken pair or two. I haven't touched Solaris in over 20 years, and have no experience with their thin clients, but the slow painting on the display smells of loads of TCP corrections and/or slow bandwidth.

[SuperprogamerTF]

The reason why the monitor on it is flashing is because, The cold cathode driver for the backlight's capacitors are bad, I had that happen on one of my monitors from the capacitor plague where the screen would strobe, and then one power cycle later they would work.

[Aruneh]

Finally something that wasn't broken in shipping!

Aaaand of course it has problems anyway. 😄

[alexthemorgan]

What makes this so cool, is that Sun was way ahead of its time regarding hotdesking. We are only starting to see widespread use of compute heavy iron in the rack, and distributed resources as necessary.

[NobleArc]

Ah, the perfect Saturday morning vid. Cheers.

[HyenaEmpyema]

I want to say THANK YOU to all the generous viewers who give Caleb this stuff, its like donating to a museum because we all get to appreciate it, and Caleb makes it work, and you're doing something awesome by giving us all that benefit. Goes way beyond giving one guy some free swag. Thanks everyone

[Ironapple]

I can’t wait to see that rack full of old servers, Sun purple and SGI purple is gonna look amazing

[Ownermode]

“The mark of the beast” hahaha always fun to make fun of Oracle. Great video as always

[damirkvajo]

Coincidental Foreshadowing - great name for a band :)

[JamesBos]

Banging the CRT on the side to bring it back to life just unlocked a core memory of me doing this often in my computer lab in school in the 90s!

[geforce]

Thanks for sharing that project. I used to work a bit on these machines in late 2000s. When we hit a load cap on our faithful SunFire V880 (abt. 250-300 concurrent users daily), we made custom scripts that ran the users' KDE sessions over SSH on Linux machines farm (running Gentoo). I still have a Sun card. I miss those times!

[JohnKiniston]

Your retro rack is shaping up nicely, I was a solaris admin in the late 90's / early 00's and our racks looked very similar with a mix of Cisco gear, Sun, and IBM servers. We had a bunch of pizza box sun's on shelves that were running stuff like DNS still mixed with the newer rack mounted gear.

[Caisuno]

I am fascinated by the sun thin client stuff. Thanks clabretro you are the highlight of my subscription feed awesome video!!

[andyg]

Your Sun Ray series is top notch mate, thank you for everything you do, record, and explain! ❤

[austinramsay]

Dude I am loving these Sun videos! So glad someone is posting Sun content!!

[omegamsx]

I was a Solaris admin in the 00s, and much prefer Sol 8 to the newer versions - it's more like the traditional unixes, with cfg files, unlike the later versions where they introduced all the *adm commands you have to learn. Go for Solaris 8 for the older Rays! The things you need to know for 8 is the # touch /reconfigure; init 6 (make it set up drivers for new hw) and # ifconfig <dev> plumb 😋

[halitimes]

Type 5 vs. type 6 was a battle. I remember we had CAD engineers refusing to switch to Blade 1000s as they shipped with type 6.

[BadKarma]

I used to build those computers at Celestica in Irvine. I was one of their testers..