We've got a policy here at Sun that we run everything, hardware and software, inside of Sun before we sell it to customers. Officially, this is known as "Sun On Sun." Unofficially, of course, we fondly call this "eating our own dog food." And it's surprisingly tasty!
For many Sun employees, this means that they're using recently released versions of Solaris on Sun hardware. For those of us on the development side of the house, though, it means we're running not-yet-released versions of Solaris, sometimes on not-yet-supported hardware.
A few months ago, I got into a pilot program to run a SunRay at home. Thin clients in general, and SunRay in particular, have been getting some pretty good press lately. By itself, that's old news; Sun was using these appliances internally before I started work here five years ago. But now I can use it at home, too. One centrally served and managed desktop session, associated with my JavaBadge, that I can bounce back and forth with me between work and home.
But there was a catch: "centrally managed" meant, effectively, "outside my control," and (perhaps more importantly) "no root access." I'm not used to that! The centralized servers are maintained for the aforementioned "many Sun employees." This isn't just a question of being cool; if I'm not running the latest builds of the operating system, then I'm out of touch with the current build quality, and I'm not doing my job as Tech Lead. If I want the advantages of both SunRay access and running not-yet-released software (eating both flavors of dogfood, as it were), I've got some hacking to do.
At least that's what I thought. What a pleasant surprise to find otherwise. A quick search of Sun's external website found me the latest released version of the SunRay Server Software, from which I was able to poke around our internal website and find a not-yet-released version. It installed easily onto my generic, dual-Opteron desktop, with a script provided as part of the build image. It configured easily, by running a simple administration program and answering the questions appropriately. And it Just Worked.
So I'm a pretty happy camper now: I'm running a days-old build of the world's coolest operating system, with all the benefits of thin client connectivity at work and home. If this is dog food, who needs carry-out?
--Mark
