Thursday March 10, 2005

Desktop access while travelling

Recently I got a question from a Sun user about whether we were going to make it faster to access your Sun Ray desktop when you are traveling. The following response from a colleague in Sun IT may have limited interest for non Sun readers. By the way I am sharing this with his permission.

Remote access to your desktop is one that we've put a lot of time and energy into. Yes, startup times and usability when traveling can be an issue, as we rely upon remote NFS mounting. Right now, today, you can access the Lightweight Roaming Desktop by choosing it before you log into a remote system. Select "Options-Sessions-Lightweight Roaming Desktop" This will bring up a desktop with email and browser capabilities which is very fast, but does not have direct access to your home directory and its preference files.

In the near future (Q1fy06) you will be able to hotdesk to your existing Sun Ray session when traveling to most parts of the world. Your single, authoritative Sun Ray session stays at your home location, but you can access if from any Sun Ray at Sun. The performance needs to still be fully tested out, but it seems to work even all the way around the world over reasonably small links. There is no startup/load time, since your desktop is already there. This feature is variously called Regional Hotdesking, Global Session Mobility, or Automatic Multigroup Hotdesking.

Soon, we will be moving your preference files onto the network by leveraging new features in JDS called APOC. This allows you to startup "your desktop" without even your home directory, and will even enable synchronization between your laptop and Sun Ray. It will also help, tremendously, with remote desktop startup, if that is still a need once hotdesking everywhere gets implemented.