Of Sun Ray laptops, MIPS and getting root on them | Hacker News Reader

Of Sun Ray laptops, MIPS and getting root on them

oldvcr.blogspot.com

102 pointszdw32 comments

In the middle of winter 2000, I was sent to Sun's "Super Training" campus in Broomfield, CO. It was a nice little campus and upon registration I was handed an access card that I could slot into any Sun Ray on the campus and access the same persistent desktop.

There were little clusters of Sun Rays all around the campus and I was very impressed with the system. It was nice to have a personal desktop environment I could customize and use for the 2 weeks that I was there.

SunRays were supremely cool in their time.

I ran a large SPARC server as my desktop workstation, with the physical server in the lab and on my desk I just had a SunRay connected to it. I could (and did) travel around the world and in any Sun office just plug my card in and my desktop would pop up.

Reading about Sun Ray reminds me of Bryan Cantrill's oldest online DTrace talk [1], particularly the story of how a GNOME 2 stock ticker applet overloaded a Sun Ray Server, and how Bryan used DTrace to find the culprit.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8

Earlier, Sun made a luggable with distinctive Sun design: https://thegogglesdonothing.com/archives/2011/10/replacing_t...

(author) The Voyager is neat, though for obvious reasons I consider it a portable workstation. I still like the Solbourne S3000 most in that category of systems. The Voyager is pretty and in colour, but the S3000 has that flaring gas plasma display that can heat and light a room. :)

Photo comparisons of Solbourne and Voyager:

http://www.sonic.net/~coad/s3000/index.html

The orange display is classic. Is it the same tech as in that Toshiba laptop, and that HP luggable?

Not sure exactly which model you mean, but those might have been electroluminescent and the S3000 is gas plasma, so different display technology.

In answer to the page author, yes, the S3000 had a matching case. Even places to store the cables and the optical mouse pad. A very stylish black nylon job.

I had a Toshiba T3100, it had a gas plasma display [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100

There were a few with gas plasma screens. I know the Compaq Portable 386 had one, and the IBM PS/2 Model P70 and P75.

Heh, didn't realize they eventually made a Sunray laptop. Since that site doesn't have pics here is the Wiki page with some pictures of the desktop thin client: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

IIRC it used some custom UDP-based protocol that worked astonishingly well compared to stuff running over TCP at the time (X, VNC, etc.)

(author) Right, Application Link Protocol/ALP. jOpenRay and my light "treason" fork kOpenRay are open-source reimplementations, though they still need a lot of work.

Man, I misss Sun. I still remember my first project after college was doing c++ jobs for to a telecon company that would run all its services on Sun Spark Servers.

I fell like Java just stop inovating after Oracle brought the company. So much I changed to C#. If I gonna use the product of a souless company, at least I will use the one the company cares about.

I loved the sun ray thin clients. They had them at my university in the early 2000 and i have not seen a better thin client solution since.

That is a truly bonkers system design. I am in awe at the excessive complexity introduced just to reuse some obscure failed Sun hardware.

I suspect that this truly bizarre design was motivated by how the Sun-provided SunRay firmware could be extended without rewriting the thing outright (and running ALP client as an userspace process on a real OS as was done in later SunRay laptops).

> Larry "Destroyer of Worlds" Ellison

Still upset about that.

Makers of evil maniac movies will never run out of role models on planet Earth.

FTA: "What the Larry Ellison!"

I wonder if mentioning "Kibo"[1] will summon him as it did in the days before the endless summer?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry

I bought a Sun Ray about ten years ago I hoped to be able to connect to a Linux machine or maybe even a Sun Blade workstation. I DON'T POWER THAT ONE ON MUCH BECAUSE ITS SO LOUD. But I hoped to run it in the garage and connect to it with the Sun Ray in my office.

I abandoned this project...almost immediately after buying the Sun Ray but maybe now I can get it running. I thought the Sun Ray was a cool extension on the idea of X terminals.

This was an extremely interesting read, especially finding out that perhaps the router chip is the real power onboard. Got me scouring ebay for old Sun hardware

(author) Hey, thanks! The 2N is Japan-only, but they turn up on Yahoo! Japan from time to time, though unfortunately for stupid money usually. I was lucky with this unit. The Gobi isn't very common either however.

If you just want a Sun Ray laptop, the Tadpole M1400 (sometimes mislabeled by sellers as a Compal FT-01, since that's the OEM system it was derived from) is not hard to find with a little patience, but it's "just" a Celeron system so it's not nearly as interesting.

This reminds me -- if one wanted to get back into running an old Sun Ray system, where the heck do you get compatible smartcards?

(author) You don't need them, strictly speaking; you can "just login." In fact, I only just got a set recently myself. However, any ISO-7816 compliant card should work. The part number on my real Sun cards is 370-4333 (specifically 370-4333-03, 72835).

Does that include if I want to go back to running a full Sun Ray server on Linux beyond kOpenRay?

(I got a stupidly good deal on a 3i that needs to sit on my desk.)

Yes, it worked fine just logging in with a user name and password to my Solaris 10 SRSS installation. No card necessary.

Oh, no no no no -- I want to go full-on card-mode. The roaming concepts are fascinating to me.

Got it. I haven't set up my Solaris system that way. There is a configuration file that handles the mapping between smart card and local user credentials, though I'll defer to someone who's actually done it. See https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E25749_01/E25745/html/Howto-Add-S...

This is also something I’m quite interested in. I have sun Ray I bought just as sun stopped offering the server side software for free, and it’s spent it’s entire life sitting unloved in my crawl space. One of my tech regrets is that I’ve never had it properly working

> False starts like NeWS aside,

You've just activated Don Hopkins's trap card!

Great article. The network is the computer is literally true in this case!

> The touch pad isn't fabulous

I swear, the best part of a Mac laptop may be its unmatched touch pad.

This is an absolutely fantastic post. Nostalgically inspiring, and to my reading intensely interesting even if you weren't previously aware of this technology. I doubt the contextual info could have been independently researched without having lived through the era. The author appears to run a gopher (!!) server so likely he is an old ~fart~ historian, not a young enthusiast.

The website could use a modern styling update though. It would be much more approachable. It's not all large font size, excessive whitespace, and low contrast for the sake of regressing towards the mean of unusable mediocrity. That said, reader mode makes it all good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com