Weblog devoted to Sun Ray's, Pinball etc. Paul Shore's Weblog

A really impressive I-Phone demo

How long do you think it takes to get a fully installed V210, Solaris 10, Sun Ray 3.1, patched, configured, mirrored, ready for use?

Week? Day? Half Day? - Try 20 minutes!

If you use the Jumpstart Enterprise toolkit, Solaris flash archives and the Sun Ray JET module you can install a Sun Ray server and get login screens in about 20 minutes!

Imagine - ordering a few racks of our new Sun Fire X4200 boxes, connecting them to your network and configuring them using JET as Sun Ray servers. A few thousand Sun Ray server seats rolled out in a couple of days!

My Sun Ray @ home kit arrived this morning consisting of:

1 x Sun Ray 1, 1 x Sun Ray keyboard, 1 x Sun Ray mouse, 1 x Cisco VPN router + Instructions.

Of course, instructions are only as a last resourt!

I was missing was a couple of ethernet cables, but I have a few of these spare so that didn't effect the setup. I have a connection spare on my KVM, so I dug out the extra KVM cable and hooked in the new Sun Ray, connected ethernet cable to the back of the Cisco and the Cisco to my home network and switched on.

And waited

And the Sun Ray on screen icon stayed at 22B

And waited

Still 22B, go get the discarded instructions, check everything - all OK

Sent an email to the guy who had set it up, who thought it might be the firmware on my home network router. In order to rule it out, I download an update, selected the update firmware option from the Linksys, all went smoothly until the reset and then nothing. No response from the routers web server. I could ping it, but it wasn't routing to the internet, wasn't running DHCP services and wasn't responding on its management web page. Arrg!

Ok, swap for the other Linksys with the wireless connection, reconfigure it to give out DHCP services and connect it to the cable modem. Reset the cable modem, internet is back on-line! Off to the Linksys page, find the manual (last resourt again), follow the instructions to reset the original router, nothing - it isn't even responding to the reset sequence. First problems that I have had with any Linksys kit in five years of usage. I will take another look at it later this week when I am over the flu (yes 5 days later and I am still feeling rough).

OK, the new Linksys has the up to date firmware and I am still having a problem. OK, lets take a look at the Sun Ray icon. Its showing a valid Sun Ray server address inside Sun, so I log into this Sun Ray server from my home machine and ping my Sun Ray terminal. VPN connection is working fine, must be the Sun Ray server.

Its not the Sun Ray server that I had expected, its one based out of the Coventry office and from the auth.props file it doesn't have LAN based connections enabled, which is probably the reason why the Sun Ray is stuck at 22B. (Note: you need to be root to run utadm -l to check if LAN connections are enabled, but an ordinary user can read the auth.props file).

As my home directory isn't in the Coventry office and they are about to make Coventry a serverless office this doesn't make a lot of sence. Couple of emails and a few phone calls later and the router is reconfigured to point the Sun Ray at the Sun Ray servers in Guillemont park. The Sun Ray now has a login screen!

Insert my Sun Java Badge and login - cool! I can now securely hot desk from Home to Coventry to London to Guillemont.

Paul

Hi,

Thought I should get around to posting my first entry, since its been a couple of days since I registered for an account.

Let me introduce myself, my name's Paul, I have worked for Sun for about 5 and a half years, based out of Cambridge in the UK. I have specialised in the Sun Ray environment every since I saw it being demonstrated during a visit to the states before it was released. This is such a cool product that I even have a Sun Ray server at home! (more on this later).

My other great passion is pinball. I have a Bally Twilight Zone sitting in my living room, this was purchased a few months after I bought my house (about 4 1/2 years ago). Imagine the senaro, moved in, no carpets, magnolia everywhere (standard new house colour), very little furniture, I visit a pinball show at Aston, Birmingham, and come back with a pinball in the back of the Golf. Not sure how we managed to get it in, but I couldn't get it out without help from colleges at the office the next day. It even stayed in the middle of the living room floor for a couple of weeks until my parents visited and gave my a lift into the corner where it now lives. Can't believe I didn't get more grief for buying a pin before carpets!

I am patching my Sun Ray server at the moment, It's a Ultra 2, twin 300s, 768MB memory and twin networks. I installed it a while ago using JET with Solaris 9 8/03, Sun Ray 2.0. Tried to run the Firefox browser today, but it complained about patch levels, so dug out the EIS CD and started patching.

Paul