Sun Ray Thin Clients Pt2: Actually Using Them

Let's take a look at a Sun Ray 1 from 1999 and a Sun Ray 270 from 2006. We'll dive into what it's like to actually use these.

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Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

[parastie]

Once upon a time, I worked for Sun on their internal tech support desk in Colorado. Someone had uploaded hours of Adult Swim cartoons onto the server, which is what we usually watched after hours when waiting for calls to come in. The thin clients work great for streaming.

[MegaManNeo]

You can tell how the legacy of Sun disappeared the moment Oracle acquired them.
It's really sad given how cool their stuff was.

[AdamJRichardson]

FYI the industrial design of the Sun Ray 1 (as well as the original Java Station) was by Montgomery/Pfeifer, a small design consultancy in San Francisco who did a lot of design work for Sun in the early 90s. (They were ex frog design designers, and frog did the design of the late 80s generation of Sun products, after having done Apple design in early 80s). I was the design lead for Sun servers in the early 90s (Sunfire/Ultraspark) and really enjoyed my time there.

[HFkepley]

Love how it has the Windows XP themed desktop can completely fool people but at the same time makes it more familiar for those that had Windows XP at home on their personal PC

[bergpolarbear]

I worked from home for a couple years while I worked at sun (13 years total) and I had a SunRay at home with the built in VPN that used the little RSA token. It was so nice! I miss those days. Was sad to have to go back to the office. I still have my old java badge around somewhere. Could plug my badge into any SunRay anywhere in the world at a Sun office and see my own running desktop wherever I happened to be, even someone else's WFH SunRay.

[rogerjenson]

I remember learning about Sun thin client infrastructure after I deployed 65 diskless workstation pizza boxes with CRT displays booting Windows 3.1 from a Novell 3.12 server on a 10Base-T network for the customer support department. The best thing about thin client computing is the ease of replacement of client equipment. Remove the suspected bad equipment, plugin the replacement equipment, customer just logs in and is ready to continue working. Thank you for the blast from the past.

[subynut]

Really cool! I'm a System Administrator who originally started off in the Windows world. When I moved into the UNIX world, the systems I managed were all Sun equipment running Oracle Solaris 10. Your Sun server was one of the models we had in our stack.
I heard about the Sun Ray systems, but never got a chance to see them or see how they worked. This was fun to see those Sun Rays in action!

[SydW]

As a long time sun user and administrator many years ago: 1. Administering a cluster of sun's be they desktops or sun-rays isn't that hard. Where as Windows uses Active Directory, Solaris uses NIS. 2. If you don't like csh and prefer bash, just change your profile to use bash in the user administration setup and when you log in you'll get bash. Of course, you'll need the usual bash startup files (.bash_profile, .bash_rc, etc.) instead of the csh ones.
And long ago you would have gotten bourne shell instead of csh. (Shell's are like editors, people are religious about them).

[ilikejamtube]

I worked at Sun in the mid-2000s. The office was all SunRays1's, with Ultra pizza boxes under the desks as lab machines.
The SunRays were great for getting someone to look at a problem you had - just throw your card across the office (need to put some spin on it to get it to fly any distance!) and they could plug it in to see what was going on then throw it back over. The original screenshare.

There was a story about someone hosing the bandwidth on a transatlantic link by flying from Scotland to the US and plugging in his card there with a session still running in Scotland, but I'm not sure that's true. The Sun wide area network was held together with bits of old string and duct tape, so it's not entirely unbelievable.

[paprw]

I can just imagine working at a call center with 1000 identical desk spaces, each station equipped with a SunRay workstation, headset, and proprietary telemarketing software (keyboard only). Honestly there's probably places still using these for that exact purpose.

[simon]

Here I am. Sitting by my computer in the middle of the night watching a video about an old system I've never used. And I'm loving it! Great stuff!

[educate]

My uni had these things in the computer science labs, but they just got rid of them the year I started. From what I was told, people loved the smart card access. The performance and really everything else, not so much. Linux workstations were already way more popular with students.

Still, great video! Makes me want to grab some of them off ebay :-)

[seshpenguin]

Sun hardware and software has such a unique feel to it, it's really tempting to build a Sun network in my homelab...

[haonnoah]

Thats one of the coolest things to experience. Seeing the backwards compatibility with the hardware and software is definitely amazing!

Apple is not a fan of backwards compatibility as their premis is 'innovation' and forcing users to 'new editions' or leave them behind.

[justine]

Keep the Sun content coming! Glad to see that subscriber number steadily growing, too!

[xXfzmusicXx]

It's really cool to see these kinds of things actually in use. A lot of the time when you see old tech it's mostly just demo'd and maybe a tear down, but that's about it.

[jcgrove]

Did a lot of work with Sun Rays when they were around, including running them over the internet to hot desk from office to home. Couple of notes, you can actually chain them together to make up to a 16 display desktop, so one person could have 16 monitors (and 16 sun rays) all tied together to make one super large desktop. Additionally they released the software for Linux late on, which running that on a more modern x86 based CPU may make some of the games you were trying run faster.. the V240 was a lower end server, and usually I ran sun ray servers on much larger servers. I had one running on a Sun F25K for a while. The Intel based ones were way faster than the Sparc ones. I had 30 Sun Rays on 1 2U Sun Intel box that had 4CPUS with like 128GB of ram on it. So technically you can run it against Solaris on Sparc or Intel as well as Linux (can't remember the exact specs on the Linux side)

[aarmono]

This video brings me back. My university had a dedicated Sun Ray lab that I got to use for a few courses. An entire room full of Sun Ray 1's with one half of the room running on one server and the other half running on another. Wasn't set up to use the smart cards though. They'd work pretty well unless you had 25 students compiling something at the same time (which tended to happen at the end of the lab period), then they'd bog down. Video worked way better than you'd expect, and most of the time it didn't feel like you were using a thin client (which is something you couldn't say about using X forwarding, VNC, or Remote Desktop at the time).

Probably the main issue we had with them was the desktop environment. I think the Sun Ray lab was on Solaris 8 which was based on GNOME 1.4. Meanwhile the Linux lab computers were all running a distro with KDE 3.0. So everything felt dated and old despite in many ways it being more technically sophisticated.

At some point they released a Sun Ray Server build for Red Hat Linux that I remember trying (and failing) to get working on my Gentoo machine. That and the soft client would have been light years ahead of any other remote desktop system at the time aside from maybe Citrix.

[thomassvedin]

I used to play with those a lot 10-14 years ago.
I had maybe 10-15 sun ray 1 and 20 that was 15 or 17 inch TFTs with built in sun ray.
They also needed powerful 12v power supplies.

I gave a bunch of the clients away and as nobody wanted the rest most got recycled.
I still have some 12v power supplies and use them when I need a powerful 12V psu for different projects.

A cool feature to explore is multi head groups. Check it out if you have time.

[keyboard_g]

I like that you do more than “I got this old server running” and then move on to the next topic.