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

This is amazing - there is no noticeable difference between running my Sun Ray from the server in the garage and the server in the office via the hardware VPN!

I haven't even got rid of the full picture background that gnome is using. I have tried to break it :- switching virtual desktops, fine scrolling in Mozilla with pictures, audio streaming, video streaming. OK, the last went a bit to far and the picture was breaking up a little, but what do you expect - I am running this over the internet.

I am seriously impressed with this.

And you know what, there is nothing special about this, anyone can do it with Sun Ray 3.0.

In my setup its a Cisco 831, but any VPN router hardware should work as long as it can can do either DHCP relay to the Sun Ray servers or provide a local DHCP with an X Window Display Manager list option to list the Sun Ray server IP addresses. The packets size should also be reduced so that packets are not fragmented by the encryption overhead of the hardware VPN.

It should just work - all of your issues with virus, spyware infected home PCs accessing the corporate network are gone!

Now that my home Sun Ray server isn't being used for the moment, it's going to get reinstalled with the latest Solaris 9 + Sun Ray 3.0. Of course I am not going to do this manually, I will break the current mirror, jumpstart one disk using JET, copy across my data, test and then remirror.

Paul

Full of flu at the moment - one of the downsides to travelling into London via public transport. At least it wasn't chickpox like last time!

Also got an email today to say that my Sun Ray @ home kit (Sun Ray, keyboard, mouse + hardware VPN) has been shipped.

Paul

The jumpstarting using JET of the latest stable build of Sun Ray 3.0 on my Ultra 30 under Solaris 9 9/04 worked fine. I now need to get the module to work better with flash archives and add the Linux changes that I have been given.

Even though I am still running Sun Ray 2.0 on my Ultra2, the firmware on my Sun Ray 1 has stayed at 3.0 level due to the barrier level in the software. It's designed to do this and I haven't seen any problems with running a 3.0 firmware terminal on a 2.0 server. I do like the firmware's new purple (sorry - Sun blue) background, although in my view the Sun logo needs to be bigger ;-)

Whilst I was waiting for the screen to be refitted on my 306GTI-6 (fourth attempt to get in right!), went next door and picked up a replacement mouse for the Sun Ray. The standard Sun USB mouse was working fine, but the chance to get a cheap optical with scroll wheel was too much to resist. Mozilla 1.4 and Firefox 1.0 PR work fine, haven't tried anything else yet.

Paul

The patching of my home Sun Ray server was successful, now running Firefox!

I am a big fan of JET (Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit) and have used it for quite a while, especially when jumpstarting a Sun Ray servers. Its really cool to to start with a blank machine, hook it to my laptop, kick off the JET build, take the customer to lunch and when you get back the Sun Ray terminals are waiting at the dtlogin prompt.

I have JET on the Solaris 10 partition on my laptop, with the media for Solaris 9, Sun Ray 2.0 and the EIS CD. The Sun Ray module needed a bit of work to get 3.0 beta working and the first test was successful with LAN based connections only. I wasn't able to test the configuration of interconnects as my test Ultra30 didn't have a 2nd interface - thanks to JM it does now.

I will download the latest build of Sun Ray 3.0 today and get test JET build with both a private interconnect and LAN connections running. Once this is working I will need to book a couple of lab machines and do a JET build of a failover group - I hope to have the updated JET module available for Sun personnel as Sun Ray 3.0 is released.

The Sun Ray JET module isn't a free module included with the JET download from sun.com, but if you are interested you can get Sun to install a JET solution which includes it.

Signed up for the work from home Sun Ray pilot in europe, but haven't heard anything yet.

Paul