Really the title says it all. For a while now my friends at the school of computer science & engineering at Oakland have been struggling with this monstrosity known as the Sunray server software. The sunrays existed there for a long time as think clients for the Solaris machines. At some point Jorge got hired as a unix admin and one of his first tasks was to replace the legacy Unix systems with newer (more user friendly) Linux systems. Slowly one by one the Solaris servers (but one, Superman your going down soon, yay) were decommissioned. And all the Sunrays were left….
Eventually Sun came out with Sunray server software for Linux, and to make a story short… like most of the other Sun software it was the opposite of awesome…. Over the two years, classes were randomly canceled, assignments extended because of the random crashes, issues, whatever else the Sunray software decided to do that day. (As a note to the reader, when the software breaks, it usually isn’t a simple /etc/init.d/sunray restart but a frantic hunt to find the cause and restore services).
But folks today is an new day. From what once was the unreliable Sunray mess @ SECS now is LTSP awesomeness dawning over the fresh carcass of sunray use at SECS (I’ve been watching to much of Metaloclipse at Jorge’s office)…. I bring you a new day:
Starting today most PCs that are connected to the SECS network can be booted to either whatever local OS is installed, or be a LTSP client for the awesome Linux application server (I say most, because there are some PCs with crappy Marvel Yukon2 cards that won’t be supported the server is upgrade to Edgy/Feisty from Dapper in the summer time, and of course some of the Opteron Sun machine).
I was bugging Jorge to try out LTSP for like 2 months, eventually one day I just installed it on a test box, and once it worked installed on a production server and said hey add this to your Active Directory DHCP server, and the rest is history.
Update: coming this summer also, usb devices (keys) and sound, which worked randomly in Solaris releases, and next to never in Linux.
2 Comments
Hmmm that’s weird my Sun Ray server is VERY stable and dang near never locks up or malfunctions running under RHEL4 and using the SRSS Linux bits. Just a few days ago I did install a LTSP on debian etch and am quite impressed but I must admit although being a Linux zealot there are several shortcommings that LTSP does not fill for my needs that Sun Ray does do such as hotdesking via a smartcard w/ session mobility, integrated firmware level ipsec vpn capabilities, session resume whereas in LTSP if I yank the network cable or suffer a network outage the session has to be kicked off again, in Sun Ray architecture it just resumes where it left off running on the server), a managable thin client web interface where you can do such functions as disable usb ports/audio/etc (Sun Ray has tomcat webapp, LTSP as far as I know has nothign like this), WAN flexability is far superior inherently IMO under Sun Ray (although I know you can setup openvpn or other vpn solutions on the LTSP to accomplish this), and finally less bandwidth utilization in a Sun Ray environment as just today I tested how many packets were passed in each a Sun Ray and LTSP env to just setup the desktop login remote display session and in the Sun Ray env it passed 200-300 packets and in the LTSP env 65-70K packets. I cant wrap my head around this as Sun Ray go over Appliance Link Protocol (ALP) and LTSP over NFS (tcp). One thing I did notice though that did function better and have better performance on the LTSP compared to the Sun Ray env is better highly intensive multimedia support for high bitrate/bw video apps. As far as local device support in each environment they are about on par in my book as far as usb thumb drives/cd/dvd roms.
One last comment I forgot to cover. LTSP does rock in terms of support and openness of course. I can’t tell you how many times I had a hard time tracking down the appropriate support channel or contact in the Sun Ray world/commununity whereas in the LTSP/Linux thin client scene I can almost always find support on the web/wiki/irc dang near immediately and better documentation publicly available IMO. Also one more thing to think about is that LTSP is in general more multi-purpose thin client frinedly and again open in terms of what thin clients run on it (basically anything that supports PXE: laptops, old repurposed PC’s, true thin client traditional brick style clients, etherboot, etc) and in the Sun Ray world those client DTU’s are proprietary and you cannot use them on anything but a Sun Ray server (Solaris or Linux) running SRSS. Just my 2 final cents
on teh subject. DAMN now I really am torn haha
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