Chris Saul's Blog

Monday December 17, 2007

Sun get the right greeting for a change

Our EMEA VP actually said 'Happy Christmas' in his 'holiday email' to staff today. I was quite pleased - by all means wish people 'Season's Greetings' and 'Happy Holidays' (which he did too), but let's not forget that it's Christmas as well.

Dubai seems to be extra Christmassy at the moment. There are no overtly Christian symbols on display, but the shops and malls are full of Christmas trees, Santas and winter scenes. There are some angels on the trees this year, something I can't remember seeing in previous years, but I might be wrong. The Philipino staff in my local supermarket are all in full song when I walk in and the shop's empty, accompanying the cheesey Christmas music CD that plays on repeat.

It probably feels more like Christmas in Dubai than it does in parts of the UK where misguided local authorities feel that any overtly Christian and Christmas displays will 'offend' the local non-Christian population. In the towns in which this is occurring for yet another year in a row, local minority leaders are probably getting tired of banging their heads against a brick wall trying to make people understand that although they are Muslim, Sikh or Hindu they are not 'offended' to see people celebrating Christmas.

It was good to see Trevor Philips putting his foot down about this recently.

Thursday September 13, 2007

Adding value - how to do it

A colleague of mine recently asked me how I manage to add quite so much value.

My response was that adding value is all about holistic strategies that encompass global goals and local niche requirements, going forward. An energised, focused team with well built out core competencies can meet client requirements for value driven strategies and networks, whilst retaining and achieving central revenue growth and dynamic market movement for both end users, stake holders and shareholders, without compromising a global ethics platform based on best practices and innovative 360 degree approaches to business process excellence.

If anyone thinks I'm wrong, please let me know.

Wednesday August 15, 2007

Speaking at VMworld

I've just had confirmation that I'll have a speaking slot at VMworld, VMware's annual conference, being held this year in San Francisco.

I'm sure my talk will be the highlight of the week, so make sure you're there to hear a 40 minute technical talk on two of Sun's recent VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure wins in Sun's Southern and Eastern EMEA region.

Can't wait..!

Wednesday February 21, 2007

Dear colleagues - send a link to the file not the file itself

Dear Colleagues

It's great to receive interesting information encapsulated in large PDF or StarOffice files. All interesting stuff, that helps me do my job better. However, sending this fascinating content as an attachment means that all of us in the field who are not lucky enough to be enjoying a highspeed connection to the internet have to wait for ages while Thunderbird downloads the file. If we're particularly unlucky we have to stop and restart Thunderbird, which is a waste of time.

We have an internal site that can be used to post files so that you can send a link to the file rather than the file instead. For the sake of my sanity, please start using it!

Warm regards

Chris

Tuesday February 14, 2006

ThinkThin blog Craig Bender has started a group blog concentrating on thin client stuff. You can find it here. In the future I'll post any technical thin client stuff there instead of here, leaving these pages free for rants and raves and my thrilling travel updates and offroad adventures. A while ago I gave myself a target of one 'technical' or general work related post a week, but haven't managed it. Still, no point writing if there's nothing particularly new to say. This new blog should encourage me to get down to things again and post some useful Sun Desktop related stuff. ( Feb 14 2006, 09:15:59 AM GST ) Permalink

Sunday January 15, 2006

Get your dog off the line Whilst catching up on work and writing up the odd blog entry I've been listening to a couple of recordings off recent conference calls I've missed. I'm pretty sure that someone's dog was barking in the background of one, whilst another section had various people having a heated discussion in Spanish in the background. Guys! It's called a mute button. Pressing it means that you can have your pets be as noisy as they want and that your colleagues can pop in for a quick chat without everyone else on the line listening to your exciting exchanges. We recently had a company wide email with the subject 'Conference call etiquette'. I thought it was going to contain some tips on how to behave and how best to manage a conf call, but it was actually a request to make sure that the correct people listened in on calls. Time for an official set of recommendations I think, the most important being to have a chairperson manage larger calls to make sure things run smoothly. As an opinionated person, the appropriate group is welcome to solicit my thoughts on this subject! ( Jan 15 2006, 05:56:07 PM GST ) Permalink

Monday December 19, 2005

Getting SchoolTool running with Solaris A customer of ours is looking at SchoolTool, as well as considering Sun Rays with Solaris on AMD for their school environment. SchoolTool is written in Python and has packages for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux available, but nothing prepackaged for Solaris. It's very simple to install, although the readme misses out a couple of critical steps and there is a small error in the Makefile. I used a recent build of Solaris Express running on my Toshiba laptop, but I expect any Solaris version will work fine, providing the right versions of Python and libxml are installed. Here are the steps I took. * Download latest source distribution from SchoolTool website. * Unpack into /usr/local, which gives me /usr/local/schooltool-0.11.3 * Ensure I have the latest versions of Python and libxml2 and that my PATH is correct. I use pkg-get to get the latest GNU stuff and handle dependencies. * cd into /usr/local/schooltool-0.11.3/Zope3 to build Zope. * Link gcc to Sun's /usr/ucb/cc mv /usr/ucb/cc /usr/ucb/cc.orig ln -s /usr/sfw/bin/gcc /usr/ucb/cc * Run python setup.py install * The readme file misses out a step here - you need to run make next to complete the installation of Zope. Whether you use Sun's make or GNU make compilation will fail with the error 'Command failed for target 'bin/runzope'. This is due to there being no bin directory present in the SchoolTool directory. Make the bin directory and run make: mkdir bin make * Everything appeared to compile correctly. * Build SchoolTool. cd /usr/local/schooltool-0.11.3 python setup.py install * The readme misses out a step here. You need to run make again. make * Create a copy of the example server configuration file: cp schooltool.conf.in schooltool.conf * Make any changes necessary. It seems to work out of the box, but you may wish to check that it doesn't conflict with any other web servers currently running. * Start the schooltool server: /usr/local/schooltool-0.11.3/schooltool-server.py * The schooltool server started and listened on the defaultport: port 7080. I accessed it via http://localhost:7080 Login with username manager and password schooltool

Sun Ray Smartcard FAQ I had to put together a little FAQ on Sun Ray smartcards for a customer recently. Since this info doesn't seem to be in one easily accessible place on the web at the moment, I'll post it here.

* The smartcards that Sun ships are Schlumberger PayFlex smartcards. They are actually now technically "Axalto" Payflex cards since Schlumberger spun off it's smartcard division. That division is now a separate entity called Axalto.

* A full list of the various cards supported is found in /etc/opt/SUNWut/smartcard.

* Cards based on ISO-7816-1 are supported. Cards with a T=0 or T=1 communication protocol are supported - you'll need SRSS 3.0 or later to get T=1 support.

* When buying cards from a vendor other than Sun, nine times out of ten no special 'activation' is required. The Sun Ray simply reads the card's serial number, no special pre-work is needed.

If the card is not instantly usable you will get an icon in your screen with a symbol representing Sun Ray and a card and a green arrow from the card to the Sun Ray.

If you look at auth.log and see that the card has not been recognized you may need to create a smartcard config file in /etc/opt/SUNWut/smartcard and include it in the probeorder.

Vendors who produce Sun Ray compatible cards:

Axalto: http://www.axalto.com

Giesecke & Devrient: http://www.gi-de.com/

G&D's Card Solutions: http://www.gi-de.com/portal/page?_pageid=42,64822&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL

SecuNet for consulting and integration of Card solutions : http://www.secunet.de/index.php?ln=2

Oberther Card Systems: http://www.oberthurcs.com

Activcard for the middleware: www.activcard.com

Gemplus: http://www.gemplus.com ( Dec 19 2005, 11:26:36 AM GST ) Permalink

Thursday December 15, 2005

First Secure Global Desktop orders The SEE region has had its first orders for Secure Global Desktop. Two countries, two different customers, well over two thousand seats in total. One success will provide full screen Windows to Sun Rays and other clients. The other will provide access to remote Windows apps to Windows PCs. Hopefully we'll have some case studies out soon. Congrats to the Sun and partner teams involved, you know who you are! ( Dec 15 2005, 01:21:41 PM GST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Can't launch Object Manager I've seen a couple of customers testing SGD (Tarantella) have a problem with launching the Object Manager or running the standard preconfigured Linux applications after installation. A quick workaround is to turn off xauth - tarantella config edit --security-xsecurity 0 Turning off xsecurity is only a workaround though. The solution is to configure the SSHD in ipv4-only mode. Docs.sun.com tells us what to do - "Using SSH and X authorization If SSH connections fail, when X authorization is enabled, you may have to run the SSH daemon in ipv4-only mode because Secure Global Desktop may not support the xsecurity extension used on your server. You enable ipv4-only mode by editing your system SSH configuration file. For example: * On SUSE Linux, edit the /etc/sysconfig/ssh file and add a SSHD_OPTS="-4" line. * On Red Hat Enterprise Linux, edit the /etc/sysconfig/sshd file and add a OPTIONS="-4" line. Note If the SSH configuration file does not exist on your system, you can create it. You must restart the SSH daemon after making this change." http://docs.sun.com/source/819-4309-10/en-us/base/indepth/ssh.html Thanks to Steve Mellor and Rick Butland for helping me out with this. ( Dec 15 2005, 01:18:59 PM GST ) Permalink

Sunday December 04, 2005

Cracking Sun Ray and Citrix blog entry I thoroughly enjoyed ThinGuy's recent article on bandwidth use of Sun Ray and Citrix. Nothing like some real data to clear things up. ( Dec 04 2005, 11:50:10 AM GST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Saturday October 29, 2005

Getting fat in Santa Clara The recent Desktop Practice meeting, held at the beginning of October, was excellent. * The practice is working well together * The product set is getting even better * Some real focus on what works and what doesn't is being implemented. This focus is long overdue at Sun for the desktop line, in my opinion. It's also a good example of how assembling product sets into practices seems to be working. The practices are active in the field and are experts on what works and what doesn't. The resulting feedback to those on high is valuable. What amazed me about this particular meeting was the ill-hidden intention of the organisers to send me home sevearl stone heavier. We had muffins, cookies, and other sweet things in the morning, fresh biscuits mid-morning, huge lunches, ice cream in the afternoon, tonnes of sugary drinks - a veritable feast, non-stop, throughout the day. You don't get that in the UK or Dubai office! ( Oct 29 2005, 02:48:00 PM GST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday October 25, 2005

Solved! Strange X-terminal Solaris access problem Last week I was being driven potty by a strange issue with various x-terminals connecting to a server running Solaris 10 for x86. It looked as if certain users were not able to connect and I couldn't work out why. The x-terminal would bring up a connection to dtlogin, but when the user logged in, they'd be thrown out of the x session altogether and back to the x-terminals chooser screen. Some users could log in - others couldn't. There were no meaningful errors in /var/dt/Xerrors and noone else appeared to have suffered anything like this before according to Google. Very frustrating. Here's what was happening - When a newly created user logs into Solaris for the first time, they are presented with a grey box asking them to choose the windowing environment they want. In our case, with a freshly installed Solaris 10 01/05, the options were CDE and JDS. The x-terminals we were using (made by WinBee) didn't like this grey box at all and simply ended the whole connection to the Solaris server. Some users were logging in correctly because we had logged them in on the server console earlier and chosen JDS - their settings were for 'last user session', which meant JDS, so they were logging in correctly. At the time though it looked like the system had some kind of limit set, as only 4 users were able to log in successfully. Logging in as a failsafe session didn't work for the new users who had not been logged in before. By setting the session manually to JDS, the new users were able to log in. I was sweating away looking like a bit of a twit in front of the customer and was pretty relieved when we worked out what the issue was. It's alway the silly little things that drive you crazy! ( Oct 25 2005, 02:58:02 PM GST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Tuesday October 11, 2005

New Tarantella/Secure Global Desktop users mailing list Stoyan Angelov hosts the successful Sun Ray users mailing list here - http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users He's kindly agreed to host a smilar list for Tarantella, or Secure Global Desktop as it is now known. You can sign up for the new list here - http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sgd-users ( Oct 11 2005, 05:20:12 PM GST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Do you need Citrix or is Terminal Server enough? This article from the esteemed Brian Madden is excellent. A couple of points quite surprised me, I have to say. Well worth a read. ( Oct 11 2005, 03:48:55 PM GST ) Permalink Comments [0]