5 ms·

Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10

145 points by jandeboevrie 5mo ago

i_think_so 5mo ago
So cool!! I thought SunRay was dead forever! I used to have a stack of those login cards from the Sun courses I took. (I think they gave them to us to to log in to the "attendance" system, but really they were just souvenirs to show your coworker when you got back.) They sat on my desk and were a marvelous kind of fidget device, like shuffling a very scanty deck of cards over and over. I bought a gen 2 SunRay in the hopes that I'd get around to installing it in my LAN some day as part of my eternal To-Do list. Sadly, I trashed all of that stuff when Sun got eaten and Solaris turned into a niche tech that I was almost embarrassed to have on my resume. I wish I had that stuff now. Thank you for submitting this link, and (if they come by here) thanks to the author for writing up such a lovely, nostalgic bit of work.
- mitchell_h 5mo ago
  The login cards were the killer feature on them(at the time). I managed a fleet of them things spread all over 4 buildings. Being able to work in one location, get up and goto another and just pickup what you were doing was INSANE in that day and age. Slapping in a keycard do it all was unheard of. We had citrix and sunray in those days. Citrix was for those that had BIG BIG BIG money and needed windows. We were a java shop, so it was either an e450 in the server room and sunrays, or ultra5s at every desk.
  - i_think_so 5mo ago
    Oh man, SunRays and e450s, desktop sessions that ran 24/7 on beefy servers accessible from anywhere, U5s with those type-V membrane keyboards... Every detail of your post makes me warm and fuzzy with nostalgia. :-) (Except the Citrix. I never admin'ed that, only used it for a few gigs.)
  - dhosek 5mo ago
    I never got to use this, but it seems like it would hit my dream computing environment (which has since advanced to an idea that my phone would fill that role so I could be working on my phone, plug my phone into a desktop or laptop workstation, continue working there, unplug, continue on the phone, move to another computer, etc. Apple’s Handoff almost scratches that itch, but it’s not quite as reliable or ubiquitous as I would like and the ideal would be that I have my whole working environment portable via the phone.
    - toast0 5mo ago
      I never used it, but Microsoft's Continuum [1], was supposed to scratch that itch too. Your phone could drive a desktop experience when you connected (wired or wireless) to a docking station (I saw a laptop shaped dock which might have been a prototype), and with the proper implementation of UWP apps (which didn't really happen, afaik) you could interact with your apps/data equally in desktop and mobile. Didn't let you run win32 apps though, which makes it kind of limiting, but if all you do is browser, messenger(s), and office suite, it could have worked pretty well. I think this would have worked better with Intel's x86 phone cpus, but those were cancelled days before the Continuum reveal, and Microsoft also did a really poor job on WM10, so nobody knows about any of this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5mo ago
      The real question is whether the phone is the actual compute, or if it's just the key card that lets you access the remote compute. I think that (provided sufficient connectivity) both of those can be reasonable trade-off options, but they certainly present different views of the world.
  - fock 5mo ago
    I saw those in use 20 years ago, when physics-class visited the local nuclear-science research center. It felt like Sci-Fi then and I have not yet seen this replicated anywhere else sadly...
alexellisuk 5mo ago
Interesting to see it all play out through the post.. OpenIndiana is virtualized, the Sun Ray connects to it and runs like a thin client. I hadn't heard of "Sun Ray" until today, but it reminds me a lot of the idea behind Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) - which I used on our school's IT lab back then at a teen. Set up an old i386 machine with the various netbooting daemons. Then on each host - boot from floppy disk, remove disk, insert in next machine until 20 hosts were running from that poor old hard drive. The nice thing was that the installed OS on each was unaffected, and each machine was running X11 over the network. Seems like those solutions were optimising for a time where hardware was overly expensive.
- lizknope 5mo ago
  Today if we say "open an xterm and type this command" we mean to start a program that runs in a window that has a text interface with a command line. Here is an X terminal from around 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal It displayed everything over the network via X11 from a more powerful workstation / server. > Datapro wrote in 1991 that X terminals could provide windowing capability, high-resolution graphics and relatively fast processing for prices starting around US$1,500, compared with workstations that could cost more than US$10,000.
  - pjmlp 5mo ago
    When I got to the university, we had a DG/UX server, the usual green and ambar phosphor text terminals, and the few lucky ones IBM X Windows terminals, which were mostly used to manage several xterms, given the choice of applications at the time.
  - SoftTalker 5mo ago
    Used these at work at my first job. A dozen developers, each with an HP X Terminal all booting/running programs off of a central HPUX server that was less powerful and had less RAM than a basic desktop PC of today.
    - 5mo ago
martinbfine 5mo ago
We had hundreds of them. Fantastic technology, really secure and reliable. Wish I had saved a few, threw them all out shortly after Oracle acquired Sun. Moved to HP and Dell thin clients with VDI. All the problems and patches and maintenance of that environment paid for a really big new house for me, lots of overtime. Thanks Microsoft/HP/Dell/VMware!
- quietsegfault 5mo ago
  My first job out of college was at a .edu, and we made good use of SunRays! The session being linked to a smartcard was excellent for popping into a computer lab anywhere on any campus to send an email in the age before smartphones.
- wolvoleo 5mo ago
  What I remember about them read them being really responsive. I also really liked the idea of the smart card, more secure than just a password. And you would transfer your entire open session to another terminal with it which was really nice. I still have one or two SunRays here but the problem is they don't allow for modern resolutions like 1920x1080x8bpp
haunter 5mo ago
The predecessor that the Sun JavaStation “Krups” is one of my all time favorite computer design https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/the-sun-javastation-10-krups.335/ https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/the-sun-javastation-... We used to have these at my workplace and always wanted to get one but they got thrown out and I didn’t manage to save one… And nowadays they are kind of rare to find on used marketplaces. And of course you can still set them up today https://youtu.be/Fb0w5OT1U58 https://youtu.be/Fb0w5OT1U58
- pjmlp 5mo ago
  Thanks for sharing, that brings back good memories. Here is another one, from the first JavaStation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxV_pR1ZsXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxV_pR1ZsXM Sun was my favourite UNIX vendor, oh well.
- GaryBluto 5mo ago
  Image for UK-based readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation#/media/File:Sun_Microsystems_JavaStation_right_side.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation#/media/File:Sun_Mi...
  - IshKebab 5mo ago
    Wow that's... hideous. I assume they didn't mean it was their favourite design aesthetically!
    - GaryBluto 5mo ago
      Taste is subjective after all. I'd say it has a certain late 90s charm to it.
      - gt0 5mo ago
        Indeed it is subjective, I think the "Krups" was beautiful.
      - IshKebab 5mo ago
ktm5j 5mo ago
I'm a huge Sun dork, so I play around with OI every now and then.. but every time I try to use OI in libvirt I have a problem where the display is cut off. This only happens when using resolutions bigger than 1024x768, and if you mouse over to that area the screen will shift over to the missing bit, so it's sort of usable.. but maddening haha. I'm pretty sure I can see the same thing happening in the picture of the sunray client they have on this page. The left hand side of the screen is cut off (you should see the clock and syspanel icons on the top left). Anyone know why this happens? And how to fix it?
- wolrah 5mo ago
  If I'm understanding you correctly, you have access to the entire desktop but some of it is off-screen at any given time, with the displayed area following the mouse? This is a feature that some graphical desktops used to have back when 640x480 and 800x600 monitors were still common, the desktop resolution could be set independently of the display resolution, so you could have a larger framebuffer that your monitor presented a view in to. I recall some graphics drivers (Matrox for sure) added this to Windows 9x and called it "virtual desktop" and I know I've seen it on a few *nix platforms too. I'd assume if the resolution adjustments work as expected below 1024x768 that whatever graphics driver OI is using in your VM only sees the virtual display as capable of 1024x768 at max and so it does this if directed to provide a larger desktop. edit: apparently xrandr calls this "panning"
eoskx 5mo ago
Fond memories of buying cheap Sun gear around 2005-2007. I had an E4500, Blade 1000, and a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 that I ran Solaris 10/11 on along with a couple of Sun Rays. Used the Blade 1000 as a Sun Ray server and it was a great experience. Glad to see it is still alive and kicking in some form.
whalesalad 5mo ago
This reminds me of one of my favorite youtube channels, clabretro: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjeznAUfx0OfCseO3gKOvEjw3oHgHLRlK https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjeznAUfx0OfCseO3gKOv...
- nticompass 5mo ago
  When I saw "Sun Ray", the first thing to come to my mind was clabretro :)
- clabretro 5mo ago
  heh, glad to hear it :)
  - whalesalad 5mo ago
    plz do novell netware next lol
    - clabretro 5mo ago
      someday, someday. definitely on the list.
khalic 5mo ago
Ah OpenSolaris, good to see you survived, but oh boy it aches my heart every time I hear your name. Just like ZFS
psim1 5mo ago
Tangentially related, if anyone has Sun nostalgia but only a bit, find a Sun Type 6 USB keyboard on eBay and plug it in. Great keyboard for a Mac. Unfortunately, the left-hand function keys (Stop, Again, Props, etc.) do not emit any usable keycodes. But everything else works.
bcantrill 5mo ago
This is so great to see. I (like many!) have fond memories of Sun Ray. For me (and I suspect for others) Sun Ray will always represent the best of Sun -- and (of course!) some of the company's unrealized potential. As an aside on Sun Ray, it played a very important (if incidental) role in the development of DTrace in that one of the first truly production systems we used DTrace on was a Sun Ray server inside of Sun that was in a huge amount of pain. (I described this in the DTrace USENIX paper[0], and also in my "Dtrace (sic) Review" talk at Google ca. 2007.[1]) [0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/usenix04/tech/general/full_papers/cantrill/cantrill.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8
maxclark 5mo ago
Sun Rays were so awesome. Smart cards for authentication and sessions. Options for fiber directly to them. Great tech that died with Sun.
_puk 5mo ago
So many good memories. My "year in industry" was watchmoor park in the UK, first 3 months spent running around sun's fancy new offices replacing all the burnt out Sunrays. Still think they've not been matched for ease of "start a session, walk away, carry on somewhere else" as if you've never left your desk.
emmjay_ 5mo ago
This post takes me back to 2006. I worked for a meat works that had Sunrays on all the corporate desktops and the IT manager (in a department of 3 supporting a billion dollar business) made the decision to move Sunrays off the clunky Solaris 10 CDE onto... Ubuntu Dapper Drake. My predecessor had worked out how to get all the bits running and we had Ubuntu on Sunray! Ref: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuOnSunRay https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuOnSunRay

145 points by jandeboevrie 5mo ago

So cool!! I thought SunRay was dead forever! I used to have a stack of those login cards from the Sun courses I took. (I think they gave them to us to to log in to the "attendance" system, but really they were just souvenirs to show your coworker when you got back.) They sat on my desk and were a marvelous kind of fidget device, like shuffling a very scanty deck of cards over and over. I bought a gen 2 SunRay in the hopes that I'd get around to installing it in my LAN some day as part of my eternal To-Do list. Sadly, I trashed all of that stuff when Sun got eaten and Solaris turned into a niche tech that I was almost embarrassed to have on my resume. I wish I had that stuff now. Thank you for submitting this link, and (if they come by here) thanks to the author for writing up such a lovely, nostalgic bit of work.

mitchell_h 5mo ago
The login cards were the killer feature on them(at the time). I managed a fleet of them things spread all over 4 buildings. Being able to work in one location, get up and goto another and just pickup what you were doing was INSANE in that day and age. Slapping in a keycard do it all was unheard of. We had citrix and sunray in those days. Citrix was for those that had BIG BIG BIG money and needed windows. We were a java shop, so it was either an e450 in the server room and sunrays, or ultra5s at every desk.
- i_think_so 5mo ago
  Oh man, SunRays and e450s, desktop sessions that ran 24/7 on beefy servers accessible from anywhere, U5s with those type-V membrane keyboards... Every detail of your post makes me warm and fuzzy with nostalgia. :-) (Except the Citrix. I never admin'ed that, only used it for a few gigs.)
- dhosek 5mo ago
  I never got to use this, but it seems like it would hit my dream computing environment (which has since advanced to an idea that my phone would fill that role so I could be working on my phone, plug my phone into a desktop or laptop workstation, continue working there, unplug, continue on the phone, move to another computer, etc. Apple’s Handoff almost scratches that itch, but it’s not quite as reliable or ubiquitous as I would like and the ideal would be that I have my whole working environment portable via the phone.
  - toast0 5mo ago
    I never used it, but Microsoft's Continuum [1], was supposed to scratch that itch too. Your phone could drive a desktop experience when you connected (wired or wireless) to a docking station (I saw a laptop shaped dock which might have been a prototype), and with the proper implementation of UWP apps (which didn't really happen, afaik) you could interact with your apps/data equally in desktop and mobile. Didn't let you run win32 apps though, which makes it kind of limiting, but if all you do is browser, messenger(s), and office suite, it could have worked pretty well. I think this would have worked better with Intel's x86 phone cpus, but those were cancelled days before the Continuum reveal, and Microsoft also did a really poor job on WM10, so nobody knows about any of this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5mo ago
    The real question is whether the phone is the actual compute, or if it's just the key card that lets you access the remote compute. I think that (provided sufficient connectivity) both of those can be reasonable trade-off options, but they certainly present different views of the world.
- fock 5mo ago
  I saw those in use 20 years ago, when physics-class visited the local nuclear-science research center. It felt like Sci-Fi then and I have not yet seen this replicated anywhere else sadly...

alexellisuk 5mo ago

Interesting to see it all play out through the post.. OpenIndiana is virtualized, the Sun Ray connects to it and runs like a thin client. I hadn't heard of "Sun Ray" until today, but it reminds me a lot of the idea behind Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) - which I used on our school's IT lab back then at a teen. Set up an old i386 machine with the various netbooting daemons. Then on each host - boot from floppy disk, remove disk, insert in next machine until 20 hosts were running from that poor old hard drive. The nice thing was that the installed OS on each was unaffected, and each machine was running X11 over the network. Seems like those solutions were optimising for a time where hardware was overly expensive.

lizknope 5mo ago
Today if we say "open an xterm and type this command" we mean to start a program that runs in a window that has a text interface with a command line. Here is an X terminal from around 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal It displayed everything over the network via X11 from a more powerful workstation / server. > Datapro wrote in 1991 that X terminals could provide windowing capability, high-resolution graphics and relatively fast processing for prices starting around US$1,500, compared with workstations that could cost more than US$10,000.
- pjmlp 5mo ago
  When I got to the university, we had a DG/UX server, the usual green and ambar phosphor text terminals, and the few lucky ones IBM X Windows terminals, which were mostly used to manage several xterms, given the choice of applications at the time.
- SoftTalker 5mo ago
  Used these at work at my first job. A dozen developers, each with an HP X Terminal all booting/running programs off of a central HPUX server that was less powerful and had less RAM than a basic desktop PC of today.
  - 5mo ago

martinbfine 5mo ago

We had hundreds of them. Fantastic technology, really secure and reliable. Wish I had saved a few, threw them all out shortly after Oracle acquired Sun. Moved to HP and Dell thin clients with VDI. All the problems and patches and maintenance of that environment paid for a really big new house for me, lots of overtime. Thanks Microsoft/HP/Dell/VMware!

quietsegfault 5mo ago
My first job out of college was at a .edu, and we made good use of SunRays! The session being linked to a smartcard was excellent for popping into a computer lab anywhere on any campus to send an email in the age before smartphones.
wolvoleo 5mo ago
What I remember about them read them being really responsive. I also really liked the idea of the smart card, more secure than just a password. And you would transfer your entire open session to another terminal with it which was really nice. I still have one or two SunRays here but the problem is they don't allow for modern resolutions like 1920x1080x8bpp

haunter 5mo ago

The predecessor that the Sun JavaStation “Krups” is one of my all time favorite computer design https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/the-sun-javastation-10-krups.335/ https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/the-sun-javastation-... We used to have these at my workplace and always wanted to get one but they got thrown out and I didn’t manage to save one… And nowadays they are kind of rare to find on used marketplaces. And of course you can still set them up today https://youtu.be/Fb0w5OT1U58 https://youtu.be/Fb0w5OT1U58

pjmlp 5mo ago
Thanks for sharing, that brings back good memories. Here is another one, from the first JavaStation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxV_pR1ZsXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxV_pR1ZsXM Sun was my favourite UNIX vendor, oh well.
GaryBluto 5mo ago
Image for UK-based readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation#/media/File:Sun_Microsystems_JavaStation_right_side.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation#/media/File:Sun_Mi...
- IshKebab 5mo ago
  Wow that's... hideous. I assume they didn't mean it was their favourite design aesthetically!
  - GaryBluto 5mo ago
    Taste is subjective after all. I'd say it has a certain late 90s charm to it.
    - gt0 5mo ago
      Indeed it is subjective, I think the "Krups" was beautiful.
    - IshKebab 5mo ago

ktm5j 5mo ago

I'm a huge Sun dork, so I play around with OI every now and then.. but every time I try to use OI in libvirt I have a problem where the display is cut off. This only happens when using resolutions bigger than 1024x768, and if you mouse over to that area the screen will shift over to the missing bit, so it's sort of usable.. but maddening haha. I'm pretty sure I can see the same thing happening in the picture of the sunray client they have on this page. The left hand side of the screen is cut off (you should see the clock and syspanel icons on the top left). Anyone know why this happens? And how to fix it?

wolrah 5mo ago
If I'm understanding you correctly, you have access to the entire desktop but some of it is off-screen at any given time, with the displayed area following the mouse? This is a feature that some graphical desktops used to have back when 640x480 and 800x600 monitors were still common, the desktop resolution could be set independently of the display resolution, so you could have a larger framebuffer that your monitor presented a view in to. I recall some graphics drivers (Matrox for sure) added this to Windows 9x and called it "virtual desktop" and I know I've seen it on a few *nix platforms too. I'd assume if the resolution adjustments work as expected below 1024x768 that whatever graphics driver OI is using in your VM only sees the virtual display as capable of 1024x768 at max and so it does this if directed to provide a larger desktop. edit: apparently xrandr calls this "panning"

eoskx 5mo ago

Fond memories of buying cheap Sun gear around 2005-2007. I had an E4500, Blade 1000, and a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 that I ran Solaris 10/11 on along with a couple of Sun Rays. Used the Blade 1000 as a Sun Ray server and it was a great experience. Glad to see it is still alive and kicking in some form.

whalesalad 5mo ago

This reminds me of one of my favorite youtube channels, clabretro: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjeznAUfx0OfCseO3gKOvEjw3oHgHLRlK https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjeznAUfx0OfCseO3gKOv...

nticompass 5mo ago
When I saw "Sun Ray", the first thing to come to my mind was clabretro :)
clabretro 5mo ago
heh, glad to hear it :)
- whalesalad 5mo ago
  plz do novell netware next lol
  - clabretro 5mo ago
    someday, someday. definitely on the list.

khalic 5mo ago

Ah OpenSolaris, good to see you survived, but oh boy it aches my heart every time I hear your name. Just like ZFS

psim1 5mo ago

Tangentially related, if anyone has Sun nostalgia but only a bit, find a Sun Type 6 USB keyboard on eBay and plug it in. Great keyboard for a Mac. Unfortunately, the left-hand function keys (Stop, Again, Props, etc.) do not emit any usable keycodes. But everything else works.

bcantrill 5mo ago

This is so great to see. I (like many!) have fond memories of Sun Ray. For me (and I suspect for others) Sun Ray will always represent the best of Sun -- and (of course!) some of the company's unrealized potential. As an aside on Sun Ray, it played a very important (if incidental) role in the development of DTrace in that one of the first truly production systems we used DTrace on was a Sun Ray server inside of Sun that was in a huge amount of pain. (I described this in the DTrace USENIX paper[0], and also in my "Dtrace (sic) Review" talk at Google ca. 2007.[1]) [0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/usenix04/tech/general/full_papers/cantrill/cantrill.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8

maxclark 5mo ago

Sun Rays were so awesome. Smart cards for authentication and sessions. Options for fiber directly to them. Great tech that died with Sun.

_puk 5mo ago

So many good memories. My "year in industry" was watchmoor park in the UK, first 3 months spent running around sun's fancy new offices replacing all the burnt out Sunrays. Still think they've not been matched for ease of "start a session, walk away, carry on somewhere else" as if you've never left your desk.

emmjay_ 5mo ago

This post takes me back to 2006. I worked for a meat works that had Sunrays on all the corporate desktops and the IT manager (in a department of 3 supporting a billion dollar business) made the decision to move Sunrays off the clunky Solaris 10 CDE onto... Ubuntu Dapper Drake. My predecessor had worked out how to get all the bits running and we had Ubuntu on Sunray! Ref: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuOnSunRay https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuOnSunRay