Using Sun Ray thin clients in 2025
catstret.ch
catstret.ch
[0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
As a concrete example, the failure to add USB printing support killed SunRay at airline kiosks in the early 2000s. American Airlines was the first airline to adopt kiosk-based check-in; they were very hot on SunRay, but needed USB printing. When American found out that Sun had just gutted the team (including everyone responsible for USB support!), they (reluctantly!) used Windows-based PCs instead. Sun tried to put the group back together, but it was too late -- and every airline followed American's lead.
Could/would SunRay have been used for airline kiosks? There are reasons to believe that it would have -- and it was certainly a better technical fit than an entire Windows PC.
There were examples like this all over the place, not just with SunRay but at Sun more broadly; despite the terrific building blocks, Sun often lacked the patience and focus to add the polish needed for a real product. (Our frustration with Sun in this regard led us to start Fishworks in 2006.[0])
RIP SunRay -- and what could have been!
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can...
Oracle did try to monetize SunRay but for whatever reason it didn't meet their profit threshold. It was fantastic technology and I'm almost certain I still have the dual monitor variation in my basement somewhere.
Occasionally you'd find one where the security was about as well executed as the function they were meant for and there was some fun to be had, but not much.
I find it hard to have much sympathy for SunRay. Their advantages were supposed to be price, but they were never cheap, and security, but that required hiring engineers that understand mainframe unix security, which management just didn't do.
Seems like a tricky problem but clearly at least some of it was solved given USB ports were on the machine
But I just realized the "USB printing support" stuff was maybe less about USB printers themselves and more about being able to have, say, 30 thin clients with 30 different printers hooked up but the application would know which printer was the right one (instead of showing 30 printers available, for example)
The main challenge has been building a modern remote desktop protocol that achieves high performance but without requiring GPUs for each user and works on Linux. VNC is really showing its age, and X forwarding isn't really usable over the Internet. We are also using Yubikeys instead of smart cards, though I'm looking forward to testing some of the FIDO2 cards that are on the market.
One of our colleagues said something that really resonated with me "When you're working using our system it should feel like you're sitting down at a personal supercomputer". There are always more features to build, but the basic vision of being able to sit down at any desk with our Warpbox and connect to your virtual desktop within a few seconds is a really nice workflow.
Is there a short trial period before I pay? I didn't see it on the website. If it really does feel like real time usage like GeForce Now with gaming, then that is seriously cool.
I'd be glad to set you up with credits to run the system through its paces. Right now our most valuable payment is feedback
Well, maybe not directly so, but NX (or rather X2Go) over ssh or VPN was working fine for me some ten years ago. Before that I happily used Sun Rays, but maintaining the Sun Ray server software was tedious after Oracle gave up on it.
I want the original promise of X, where I choose where apps run and they are displayed locally:
• Run CAD circuit layout app on Pro server.
• Run Adobe Premiere on GPU server.
• Run distributed `make` on build cluster.
And of course, I want to be billed in resource-seconds, not per hour of a host made available to me.
Also enjoyed the keyboards (with control where caps lock "normally" is)...
There was a period however where semi-thin and semi-thick clients were being experimented with. Get you a fatter client, that uses thin client provisioning and can be pressed into service as a hot seat RDP/Citrix machine, or used solo for other basic purposes.
p.s. what's up with the capitalization in this article? Sentences not starting with capital letters are harder to read.
It's some irritating trend with a few folks. Like an "oh im too busy to bother with that".
With modern network speeds it's interesting to consider how good a thin client could be these days.
I also travel a lot, and it's great to have all of my applications and data right where I left them from any desk in any office
One thing lead to another and now we're building our own server software, thin client OS (no hardware yet, we load our image on COTS x86 devices), and public VDI cloud.
could do the same with Atari, Cray, even a rebrand of SGI to Silicon General Intelligence. I miss muscular tech like that.
Atari has been brought back! https://atari.com
HPE is using the Cray brand: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/compute/hpc/supercomputing/cray-ex...
Coincidentally, https://www.sgi.com/ redirects to the HPE Cray link above.
It does feel like a bunch of universities in particular could have taken advantage of something like this. Something akin to the laptop "close the lid and just open it back later whenever", but on all the desktops on campus. Sounds amazing in theory!
Probably a nightmare in practice to deal with though. There's so many advantages to having people turn off their machines.
Just imagine, one ID that would work for both doors and computer access, no need for clunky username/password+2FA juggling. Just tap your card (and optionally, if a institution chooses, enter a pin for a second factor), and you're off to the races.
This could easily be implemented through mobile phones too, since most have NFC nowadays, if cost of credentials that can do asymmetric operations is a concern.
Of course, this would never happen, as both Academia and Access Control are extremely slow-moving fields stuck with decades of legacy solutions. The vast, vast majority of institutions still use what amounts to static unchanging ""passwords"" sent across the wire (usually unencrypted!) to authenticate users.
This is something I've been thinking of for a long time, and had no idea Sun had beat me to the punch long before I was even born! What a shame, they were really ahead of their time.
I loathe them.
I worked for A Large Government Agency that was deeep into the Sun ecosystem and was using a Sparcstation 5 workstation well into early 2000s running GIS, RF analysis, and report writing tools. It was a 24x7 operation with shifts of users logging in and out every 12 hours and those systems were never not in use and never powered off. They, and the software, were practically flawless.
Then we switched to Sun Rays. For "security" and "cost". It was a disaster. The latency even just across a couple of floors, was terrible. They spent more on titanically large, best-of-the-best, fantastically equipped servers and immediately the several hundred users trying to use them overwhelmed disk I/O, network throughput, and memory capacity.
We had to log in in staggered blocks, with 5-minute gaps between groups of 20 or so people inserting their cards.
My memory is starting to fade but I recall there being absurd amounts of downtime, with weekly briefings about capacity upgrades and equipment installs and the constant presence of network and server installers dragging pallet jacks and ladders around the facility.
"Oh the servers were underspecc.." NO. They were not. They were literally and actually millions upon millions of dollars of the absolute best and most capable servers Sun sold. We had Sun employees working in our facility. They had an open spigot of cash flowing from the Large Government Agency directly into their accounts to do carte blanche whatever they needed to do to make it work.
If the servers were over-subscribed it was because the ability to deploy that much capacity did not exist for any, infinite, amount of money and Sun knowingly and willingly ripped us off.
It never worked. The experiment made my professional life a living hell for several years.
In 2005-2006 they gave up and moved to Dell workstations running Windows XP professional using thrown-together Java or X11 versions of all of the applications.
Except for capacitors exploding at random intervals, it was "fine".
Moving from ancient vector-graphics GIS tools to Google Earth blew my mind though...
edit: literally never, ever, did anyone need the ability to pull their card out, walk over to another person's desk, and say, "Well hey Jim take a look at this!" and move their session.
Maybe here, but in other discussions surrounding Sun Rays there were decidedly mixed sentiments.
> The latency even just across a couple of floors, was terrible.
That sounds odd. In my experience, latency over public Internet (using the built-in Cisco compatible VPN client) across town was perfectly usable (much better than VNC over SSH using Linux hosts). The protocol they are using tries hard to minimizes the effects of network latency.
> several hundred users trying to use them overwhelmed disk I/O, network throughput, and memory capacity.
Yeah, that's much easier to see. Imagine thin clients being used these days with servers having many dozen GiB of RAM and NVMe storage ...
> We had to log in in staggered blocks, with 5-minute gaps between groups of 20 or so people inserting their cards.
I dimly recall having read about such. I wonder, whether that ever got fixed.
> Moving from ancient vector-graphics GIS tools to Google Earth blew my mind though...
Yeah, Sun Rays weren't a good fit for 3d graphics nor movies (which wasn't much an issue twenty years ago, but won't do today). Sun (Oracle?) produced an video clip advertising their use in a hospital. That (and call centers) is were they could have shined.
> edit: literally never, ever, did anyone need the ability to pull their card out, walk over to another person's desk, and say, "Well hey Jim take a look at this!" and move their session.
Moving between "data center" (next to the office), office and home and taking my session with me, made my work (mostly performance tests then) easier. Never got to yank out someone else's smard-card and session though, as I was the only one using those ;-}