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

If you are visiting Las Vegas for CEC 2007 (or just visiting Las Vegas) and you like pinball, you must visit:

Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame Museum

Another UK pinball show coming up soon:

UK Pinball Show - Wicksteed Park

Saturday 29th September 2007 11am - 7pm

Sunday 30th September 2007 10am - 5pm

A really impressive I-Phone demo

This is where anyone who has an interest in Pinball (including me) is going to be this weekend!

UK Pinball Show - Villa Park, Birmingham

Saturday 22nd July 2006 - 10am - 6pm

Sunday 23rd July 2006 - 10am - 4pm

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!

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

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

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

My pinball has developed a couple of faults - one is a loose wire, somewhere under here:

Its an intermittent fault, that stops the power ball being recognised. Thankfully the machine can still operate with quite a few faults, you just get an indication that something is wrong by the credit/free play being followed by a full stop. Pressing a button inside the coin door will report what

The other is a bit more serious, the display control board is failing, resulting in a partially corrupt display - the board will need to be sent away for repair.

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 only piece of electronic equipment that I own that has actually gone up in value!

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

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