Once upon a time, I worked for Sun on their internal tech support desk in Colorado. Someone had uploaded hours of Adult Swim cartoons onto the server, which is what we usually watched after hours when waiting for calls to come in. The thin clients work great for streaming.
Ha that's awesome. I should have tried playing some video on these, that would've been a good test. Had so many ideas and only a few made it in the video haha.
For video streaming you will get poor performance. For this, you must user other protocol like Teradici, Blast (VMware), or put some 3D compatible video card on the server side.@@clabretro
I worked from home for a couple years while I worked at sun (13 years total) and I had a SunRay at home with the built in VPN that used the little RSA token. It was so nice! I miss those days. Was sad to have to go back to the office. I still have my old java badge around somewhere. Could plug my badge into any SunRay anywhere in the world at a Sun office and see my own running desktop wherever I happened to be, even someone else's WFH SunRay.
FYI the industrial design of the Sun Ray 1 (as well as the original Java Station) was by Montgomery/Pfeifer, a small design consultancy in San Francisco who did a lot of design work for Sun in the early 90s. (They were ex frog design designers, and frog did the design of the late 80s generation of Sun products, after having done Apple design in early 80s). I was the design lead for Sun servers in the early 90s (Sunfire/Ultraspark) and really enjoyed my time there.
I remember learning about Sun thin client infrastructure after I deployed 65 diskless workstation pizza boxes with CRT displays booting Windows 3.1 from a Novell 3.12 server on a 10Base-T network for the customer support department. The best thing about thin client computing is the ease of replacement of client equipment. Remove the suspected bad equipment, plugin the replacement equipment, customer just logs in and is ready to continue working. Thank you for the blast from the past.
Love how it has the Windows XP themed desktop can completely fool people but at the same time makes it more familiar for those that had Windows XP at home on their personal PC
Really cool! I'm a System Administrator who originally started off in the Windows world. When I moved into the UNIX world, the systems I managed were all Sun equipment running Oracle Solaris 10. Your Sun server was one of the models we had in our stack. I heard about the Sun Ray systems, but never got a chance to see them or see how they worked. This was fun to see those Sun Rays in action!
I worked at Sun in the mid-2000s. The office was all SunRays1's, with Ultra pizza boxes under the desks as lab machines. The SunRays were great for getting someone to look at a problem you had - just throw your card across the office (need to put some spin on it to get it to fly any distance!) and they could plug it in to see what was going on then throw it back over. The original screenshare. There was a story about someone hosing the bandwidth on a transatlantic link by flying from Scotland to the US and plugging in his card there with a session still running in Scotland, but I'm not sure that's true. The Sun wide area network was held together with bits of old string and duct tape, so it's not entirely unbelievable.
That's awesome. I swear another commentor left a similar story about that transatlantic session, must've been at the very least a strong urban legend ha.
My uni had these things in the computer science labs, but they just got rid of them the year I started. From what I was told, people loved the smart card access. The performance and really everything else, not so much. Linux workstations were already way more popular with students. Still, great video! Makes me want to grab some of them off ebay :-)
What year was that? My uni (Brunel) had SPARC Stations and Ultra SPARCs when I joined in 1997. By that point the SPARCs were old and the Ultras were new and rare but they all came with HUGE _very_ high res CRT monitors that were not beaten for another 15+ years to my mind.
I can just imagine working at a call center with 1000 identical desk spaces, each station equipped with a SunRay workstation, headset, and proprietary telemarketing software (keyboard only). Honestly there's probably places still using these for that exact purpose.
It's really cool to see these kinds of things actually in use. A lot of the time when you see old tech it's mostly just demo'd and maybe a tear down, but that's about it.
yeah it’s annoying. even alot of people that make videos on rare or obscure equipment never show it off in action, even if they have all the stuff to show it off in action and works just fine, won’t show it. they can fix it, and talk about it all day in the video but showing it working? no…
As a long time sun user and administrator many years ago: 1. Administering a cluster of sun's be they desktops or sun-rays isn't that hard. Where as Windows uses Active Directory, Solaris uses NIS. 2. If you don't like csh and prefer bash, just change your profile to use bash in the user administration setup and when you log in you'll get bash. Of course, you'll need the usual bash startup files (.bash_profile, .bash_rc, etc.) instead of the csh ones. And long ago you would have gotten bourne shell instead of csh. (Shell's are like editors, people are religious about them).
Did a lot of work with Sun Rays when they were around, including running them over the internet to hot desk from office to home. Couple of notes, you can actually chain them together to make up to a 16 display desktop, so one person could have 16 monitors (and 16 sun rays) all tied together to make one super large desktop. Additionally they released the software for Linux late on, which running that on a more modern x86 based CPU may make some of the games you were trying run faster.. the V240 was a lower end server, and usually I ran sun ray servers on much larger servers. I had one running on a Sun F25K for a while. The Intel based ones were way faster than the Sparc ones. I had 30 Sun Rays on 1 2U Sun Intel box that had 4CPUS with like 128GB of ram on it. So technically you can run it against Solaris on Sparc or Intel as well as Linux (can't remember the exact specs on the Linux side)
I used to play with those a lot 10-14 years ago. I had maybe 10-15 sun ray 1 and 20 that was 15 or 17 inch TFTs with built in sun ray. They also needed powerful 12v power supplies. I gave a bunch of the clients away and as nobody wanted the rest most got recycled. I still have some 12v power supplies and use them when I need a powerful 12V psu for different projects. A cool feature to explore is multi head groups. Check it out if you have time.
Thats one of the coolest things to experience. Seeing the backwards compatibility with the hardware and software is definitely amazing! Apple is not a fan of backwards compatibility as their premis is 'innovation' and forcing users to 'new editions' or leave them behind.
This video brings me back. My university had a dedicated Sun Ray lab that I got to use for a few courses. An entire room full of Sun Ray 1's with one half of the room running on one server and the other half running on another. Wasn't set up to use the smart cards though. They'd work pretty well unless you had 25 students compiling something at the same time (which tended to happen at the end of the lab period), then they'd bog down. Video worked way better than you'd expect, and most of the time it didn't feel like you were using a thin client (which is something you couldn't say about using X forwarding, VNC, or Remote Desktop at the time). Probably the main issue we had with them was the desktop environment. I think the Sun Ray lab was on Solaris 8 which was based on GNOME 1.4. Meanwhile the Linux lab computers were all running a distro with KDE 3.0. So everything felt dated and old despite in many ways it being more technically sophisticated. At some point they released a Sun Ray Server build for Red Hat Linux that I remember trying (and failing) to get working on my Gentoo machine. That and the soft client would have been light years ahead of any other remote desktop system at the time aside from maybe Citrix.
Thank you very much for bringing this content. I have been a Sun server administrator for many years at the beginning of my professional career. I've routed, installed and administered many SPARC and x86 servers as well as Sun Ray 2 and Sun Ray 3 light terminal farms. I've installed many VDI platforms linking Sun with Windows XP and Windows 7. I can pass you documentation on that to put together maybe a quick video of what it was like. Then Oracle came along, and shut down everything related to Sun Ray terminals. Please don't stop uploading content with Sun equipment. 🤓
Very cool! What was the largest Sun Ray install you managed? You can reach me at the email in the channel about page to send docs... usually Oracle still hosts all the Sun documentation on these (amazingly), but I haven't started looking into how to get the Windows stuff working yet.
I had the honor of using both a Sunray 1 and a SunRay 2 at my desk and at in home while working for SunOracle. Something about them remains futuristic even though the last time I used one was in 2017
Great video. I remember Sun very well, it was my introduction to Unix world and serious IT in general. Luckily my Uni had a friendly Solaris admin that helped my in my 1st steps. That was golden years!
We used to have a PC lab with sun rays in my University. The lab was aimed for the IT students. Wrote most of my C/C++ exercises on these machines. Never had an issue with them. Thin clients were pretty impressive back in the day. The lab was also noticeably cooler and quieter than the standard Windows PC labs.
Great to see all this Sun content. I was a Solaris system admin as part of my job for years. I haven’t been near any in over 5 years. Brings back some great memories.
Well, I'm excited to see systems like these. As a SYS admin today it's incredibly interesting to see these old enterprise systems running. Wondering what the power usage is for these systems including server.
It was quite common for the stands on the Sun Ray 1 to break, often they would split down the seam where the two halves of it was joined together. Regarding the Sun Ray 2FS, when Sun starts to manufacture a new product it would build a small batch of them first as a design verification test, hence the DVT label on the unit, these machines would be built and then undergo extensive testing. After that a larger batch of the product would be built as a process/production verification test, known as PVT, once these processes had been completed and passed the product would then go into full production. At least as far as I can recall.
Interesting! Some others have said the same thing about DVT, so that makes sense. Unfortunate this one got hurt -- if the ebay seller just refunds me I'll get it put back together though.
Back in 2015 I acquired a Sun Ray one...with the plastic stand mostly intact. Not sure what to do with it. But this series might inspire me to do something.... Fun fact: Various DoD support agencies (which will remain unamed) used these Sun ray thin clients into the early 2010s....
My grandfather was a professor at Weber State for 40 years. He implemented the sun rays technology throughout the computer science department. However the campus was mostly windows. So there was a lot of push back.
I used to have a 2FS on my desk in 2010-2014? With dual monitors. Ours were set up with RDP clients, so I'd use my Java card to log into Solaris, and then use "Trusted Path" to connect to Terminal Services and get a Windows session. We had a few different servers that we could connect to at different classification levels, and Trusted Path made sure that we couldn't copy and paste from high to low, etc. It was pretty neat. The mobile session thing was also greatly appreciated. I could set up a presentation, pull my card, drive 100 miles to the headquarters, and my ready to go presentation would be waiting for me when I put my card into the Sun Ray in the conference room. Later on, we started getting Sun Ray 3 clients, which were nicknamed "toasters" due to the card slot being on the top of the machine.
From what I can gather (I’ve never used these), you could get these working with a modern Linux install because they’re all based on X forwarding. Unix/Linux stuff is neat.
You could forward an X application to the SunFire server as that is where the X display software is running, not on the Sun Ray terminal, those speak a proprietary protocol that is more like RDP or VNC, just slinging the framebuffer across the network from the SunFire server where everything actually runs.
Ahh. I must have misread the exact specifics of the Ubuntu Wiki page on the topic. Troelshansen6650 notes that the sun ray server software was ported to Linux so theory states you can get it working with a Linux box. Actual mileage probably varies.
I used to have a think client on my desk back in 2009 I believe. We had Sun, AIX, Windows & some other systems in the closet at the company - did software for document processing back then for banks, insurance companies and such and they ran batch jobs on oooooooooold systems.
One university I studied on had the Sun Ray 2 computer room. We had there only CDE - pain in the ass to use it - it was slow and we learned linux on it. Also we had RDP access to those servers and could test our C programs there... what I can say - on Ubuntu and windows the program run differently than on Sun :) Year was 2011. I thing they might ditch Sun Ray in later years. I left after 2011 to another Uni, but the experience is still vivid :D
I've really enjoyed this video series. Seeing Real Player was a blast from the past that I had on the Windows side. Too bad these didn't take off these would have been great to have in my public school.
You can use vi editing shortcuts in the C shell. Do a set -o vi, then use esc-k to go up a line, j to go down, l to move the cursor right and h to move it left. Or just do what you did and launch bash.
I need a hot desking thin client product like this in 2023, and probably for the next 10 years. This hasn’t gone out of style (Solaris and Java definitely have)
CDE !!! Used that at uni 25yrs ago via an NCD client. At the time, seemed quite clean/simple after years of Win98 fluorescence… Happy times learning C++ on these…😁
My university had a bunch of these in the library (along with Macs and Windows PCs). They were indeed mainly used for web surfing and productivity tasks. It was pretty cool that a bunch of random college kids could just use a real Unix for basic stuff. I respected the pedigree but Solaris itself didn't seem to offer much that Linux didn't already have to me on my local machine.
Actually i have a few unused dells wyse thin clients in the office. They're still good. Watching your video has given me the idea to revive them on a linux terminal server. They can be useful iin the office as extra terminals ..
@@paulstubbs7678 we've actually deployed mostly cloud services since 2021. All users on office 365, from on premise, and using outlook word excel in browser, Asana as a work management platform and all our other services are cloud based. We've moved away from expensive PC's to minisforum or equivalent. We had a previous VDI deployment and the Wyse clients are now just sitting somewhere in the server room. Linux is a perfect open source option to get them back up and install around the building where new staff can use them or when we have interns..
We had a bunch of Sun Rays in high school - they switched us from dedicated computers running Novell Netware on XP to Oracle's virtual desktop infrastructure. They didn't do a great job with the transition though because performance was horrible so everyone hated them. I'm pretty sure that was an issue with their virtualization environment and not the Sun Rays though. The only neat thing was that they also gave us remote access to our machines from home, although you had to book time slots in advance for some reason lol. Why they didn't just switch over to a normal Windows domain environment + maybe some terminal servers is beyond me though, since all that stuff was readily available in the late 00s and surely must have been less... out there.
Very interesting video. I wonder how much cheaper buying a fleet of Sun Ray would have been compared to a dedicated desktop for each person in an office. It's just fashinating how in a couple of years laters PCs and laptops became dirt cheap.
I think one of the factors that killed these off was PCs getting insanely cheap in the mid 2000s (relative to just a few years earlier). There are of course thin client installs to this day, but it definitely didn't take off the way proponents of them thought they would.
Love the Sun content! You've inspired me to try and get a solaris install running so i can mess around with mine! One of my 270s won't boot though, so if you need one for parts or want to try to get it working I'd be happy to ship it!
So, the csh variant you should look at is tcsh. It behaves pretty much the same way as csh but has all the nice bash things like command line completion, history and customisable shell prompt. I learnt tcsh in my uni days some 35 years ago on Ultrix.
Basically X-Windows terminals with a smart card. At the time. far cheaper than deploying Sun workstations. X-Windows was developed at MIT and had the tech for remotely sending / receiving display kb/mouse over the network for many years prior to Sun making it rather easy to setup. I remember the Xroaches program and the engineers remotely running it on the secretaries X-Windows session. She would move a window and digital roaches would scatter then hide under the remaining windows. You'd hear the screams across the office.
Not quite, the protocol between the Sun Ray and the SunFire server is _not_ X it's a proprietary protocol more like VNC or RDP, although the X display server software does run on the server. X can't support hot-desking or reconnection because the display server is _not_ stateless, any X-compatible remote desktop that supports those features is running a full screen session on the server and sending the composited frame-buffer, not X, across the network.
The protocol used in SunRay was much more robust against high latency networks (which enabled them to be used on VPN connections). X11 was completely unusable on anything other than LAN.
Looks like a period-correct 2005 dell monitor too... I couldn't help but wonder if a chromecast with google tv could be repurposed to the same task without the smart card support, maybe with a custom android app.
Always liked terminal pc and servers. when i was student at the university 2002-03 was work LTSP ( Linux Terminal Server Project). Linux version of Sun Solaris :)
I used to deal with these for work back in the day, thought they were super cool. I had them running around the house for quick web terminals. Kitchen recipe computer anyone? ;)
Amazing tech, especially considering the era! RDS and VDI have been gaining popularity in the past decade but it took a long time to become really usable and clients are not nearly as plug and play as these. Modern security requirements play a part in that as well, of course.
I have always been interested in Sun Systems hardware, being able to log in from any machine and having a low power thin client seem like a win to me considering alot of office work does not need to be MS office based only.
My school swapped all the old ass desktops and CRTs for the 2 thin clients and TFT monitors and at the time this was really unheard of at schools in the UK, using linux especially, I thought it was amazing, it stopped all the kids plugging in there USBs with dodgy stuff on, and getting around restrictions :P
You should do a video series on Novell directory, architecture and system, My local community college used that system for their network authentication servers basically up until 2018 when they finally switched to Microsoft's active directory. Yet everyone else was using active directory since it first came out. I remember using active directory in middle school on Windows XP and I still use it in my home environment for my gaming room
Also do series revolving around retro apple Enterprise stuff like the Apple XServe series of servers, apples, open directory, Apple's network boot deployment services and Apple remote desktop. I used all the Apple stuff back in high school because my high school was all Mac except for the one business science course lab which had windows XP
Net boot on Mac OS x leopard up until I believe Yosemite allowed you to basically turn a bunch of Inacs into thin client type devices. You would have a net boot server on the network running the images and if you took the hard drives out of the macs and used apples enterprise management functions of Mac OSX server you could basically force those computers to boot from the network image by default
OS X net boot was really cool, that'd be a neat video (I only have one old Mac though, ha). I'd like to cover Novell eventually as well, I actually have a complete in box copy of NetWare Lite v1.1.
Ain’t that so true…. My windows virtual “pc” is so much more accessible in my workplace. Can login from home, change seat/floor in office seamlessly. Sun nailed it first and properly !
I love your videos. I have a Sun Ray 1 (with stand), a Sun Ray 2 and a V210 and V490 for servers (and a V890 with 8 ultraSPARC IV+ and 32 GB RAM but it is too expensive in terms of electricity to play much around with it). I have not tried to get the SunRAY's running, but your videos make my fingers itch. I even have a SunPCI II pro in my V490 which I never tried out. I wait for your video about your SunPCI III. Which Java-Cards are compatible with the SunRay's? Please keep up your great work.
These, in theory: shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/SunRay1/component.smartcards.html I bought these on Amazon and haven't gotten them to work, but I suspect they're just unprogrammed: www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09BVMZC97 I've heard credit cards will work, but haven't tried it yet. I'll put out an update video on it if I can figure out a third party option. The Sun Rays are still worth playing with! Still very cool even without the cards.
Makes me ponder how it would be to have a slew of concurrent users on a server. And if load balancing between servers were a thing and if such how dynamic was that. Could it toss around active sessions, or just offline ones. And how big of a server could one theoretically get at the time? 4-16 sockets, or more? So many curiosities about the back end of things left hanging here.
I remember trying the Java Desktop on Solaris x86 and I had to laugh really hard. An uninspired gnome nearly unusable. It is really sad - I think Sun should have put much more efforts in a better gnome port. Thank you for showing how the netclients worked.
Csh does not have bash style history. Tenex csh, tcsh does have history but it works differently from bash. Its interesting that I use a remote network desktop for work today. My "thin client" is a thinkpad x1 carbon with a highly customized windows 10 install. Nomachine NX connexts me to my "desktop" a linux desktop on some remote server. Dunno what voodo magic its using but i can evwn watch youtube on it. We even have hotel desks where i can login and attach to the same session.
I have something even more retro, a SparcStation SLC (or maybe elc, it’s not marked), it’s a 25 or 33mhz sparc system in a 17inch monochrome crt. If you are anywhere near Arizona I’d be happy to give it to you.
@clabretro I was a UAS Operator for the Army, and our ground control station ran ultrasparc IIi 650 mhz cpu's. A lot of military C4I Systems were Solaris. They have mostly moved on to other computing systems. The RQ-7B finally got all its systems upgraded 2020. I do miss that ultrasparc computer though.
@@tech-vp5xe that's awesome to hear about. those ultrasparc IIis were getting old by then! I haven't heard anything specifically about the government using Solaris, so this is really cool to hear.
cool how that had the card to log into the network, and move your work with you! that's awesome! 😀👍 so the card basically had your log in info on it, and then if you moved to another machine, it would log you onto your account, but on a different client? I assume that is how it worked. . . .
Recalling from back in the day (which was quite a while ago) -- yes there's no command editing (which includes the uparrow through history) in csh. But it should have history, and I'm surprised there is no command. First you have to set history=n for a history buffer of n commands (normally in .cshrc). One normally invokes the command history with "!". So "!!" on a line by itself should re-run the last command and "!e" should re-run the last command that began with an "e". “!20” will run command number 20. (I just checked all this in a 4.3BSD on SIMH. Perhaps there is an issue with versions of csh?) You’re right - just run bash!
14:00 - I would be the rebooting issue is bad caps in the PSU, as you mentioned had to be replaced sometimes. Once it gets up to temperature, the cap(s) fail and power becomes too unstable and it reboots, the hanging could also be indicative of this issue. Unstable power can make computers behave very strangely.
Dude, these videos are so cool. Keep this up. I love your commentary. I sort of wonder when the thin client becomes the usability bottleneck. How far could you power up the server before the thin clients' latency and hardware limitations become the lowest common denominator?
At scale ? Looking at this: NFS/NIS/NIS+/LDAP should centralize the user parts (username/password and user profile files), I don't know about the connecting of the cards to the user, my guess is they are also handled by NIS/NIS+/LDAP ? And that would be it, you'd have a server for every X users desks which would run the applications for those users and that's it. You already mentioned the jump-start server. Doesn't sound to bad to me !
I still think that work computers could do with something like this. it would be a dream to just slam your badge into the computer and be logged in in seconds, no password or anything after first login a lot of business laptops so have a smart card reader so it is possible to do.
Once upon a time, I worked for Sun on their internal tech support desk in Colorado. Someone had uploaded hours of Adult Swim cartoons onto the server, which is what we usually watched after hours when waiting for calls to come in. The thin clients work great for streaming.
Ha that's awesome. I should have tried playing some video on these, that would've been a good test. Had so many ideas and only a few made it in the video haha.
For video streaming you will get poor performance. For this, you must user other protocol like Teradici, Blast (VMware), or put some 3D compatible video card on the server side.@@clabretro
God, that sounds awesome. What a time to be alive and in IT
that's fucking beautiful
so you work at oracle now?
You can tell how the legacy of Sun disappeared the moment Oracle acquired them.
It's really sad given how cool their stuff was.
I worked from home for a couple years while I worked at sun (13 years total) and I had a SunRay at home with the built in VPN that used the little RSA token. It was so nice! I miss those days. Was sad to have to go back to the office. I still have my old java badge around somewhere. Could plug my badge into any SunRay anywhere in the world at a Sun office and see my own running desktop wherever I happened to be, even someone else's WFH SunRay.
Very cool, it seems like Sun might've been the largest deployment of these things.
FYI the industrial design of the Sun Ray 1 (as well as the original Java Station) was by Montgomery/Pfeifer, a small design consultancy in San Francisco who did a lot of design work for Sun in the early 90s. (They were ex frog design designers, and frog did the design of the late 80s generation of Sun products, after having done Apple design in early 80s). I was the design lead for Sun servers in the early 90s (Sunfire/Ultraspark) and really enjoyed my time there.
Very interesting, thanks for that info. I've always liked the various iterations of the Sun designs, fascinating to hear you were part of it!
I remember learning about Sun thin client infrastructure after I deployed 65 diskless workstation pizza boxes with CRT displays booting Windows 3.1 from a Novell 3.12 server on a 10Base-T network for the customer support department. The best thing about thin client computing is the ease of replacement of client equipment. Remove the suspected bad equipment, plugin the replacement equipment, customer just logs in and is ready to continue working. Thank you for the blast from the past.
Very cool. I'll eventually subject myself to the pain of setting up a Novell network down in the basement here haha. Thanks for watching!
Love how it has the Windows XP themed desktop can completely fool people but at the same time makes it more familiar for those that had Windows XP at home on their personal PC
Really cool! I'm a System Administrator who originally started off in the Windows world. When I moved into the UNIX world, the systems I managed were all Sun equipment running Oracle Solaris 10. Your Sun server was one of the models we had in our stack.
I heard about the Sun Ray systems, but never got a chance to see them or see how they worked. This was fun to see those Sun Rays in action!
Nice!
Keep the Sun content coming! Glad to see that subscriber number steadily growing, too!
Thank you! More to come of course!
I worked at Sun in the mid-2000s. The office was all SunRays1's, with Ultra pizza boxes under the desks as lab machines.
The SunRays were great for getting someone to look at a problem you had - just throw your card across the office (need to put some spin on it to get it to fly any distance!) and they could plug it in to see what was going on then throw it back over. The original screenshare.
There was a story about someone hosing the bandwidth on a transatlantic link by flying from Scotland to the US and plugging in his card there with a session still running in Scotland, but I'm not sure that's true. The Sun wide area network was held together with bits of old string and duct tape, so it's not entirely unbelievable.
That's awesome. I swear another commentor left a similar story about that transatlantic session, must've been at the very least a strong urban legend ha.
My uni had these things in the computer science labs, but they just got rid of them the year I started. From what I was told, people loved the smart card access. The performance and really everything else, not so much. Linux workstations were already way more popular with students.
Still, great video! Makes me want to grab some of them off ebay :-)
Thanks! The Sun Ray 2 variants are usually pretty affordable (and nice -- I like the Sun Ray 2s a lot)
What year was that?
My uni (Brunel) had SPARC Stations and Ultra SPARCs when I joined in 1997.
By that point the SPARCs were old and the Ultras were new and rare but they all came with HUGE _very_ high res CRT monitors that were not beaten for another 15+ years to my mind.
I can just imagine working at a call center with 1000 identical desk spaces, each station equipped with a SunRay workstation, headset, and proprietary telemarketing software (keyboard only). Honestly there's probably places still using these for that exact purpose.
Here I am. Sitting by my computer in the middle of the night watching a video about an old system I've never used. And I'm loving it! Great stuff!
haha thanks!
Sun hardware and software has such a unique feel to it, it's really tempting to build a Sun network in my homelab...
Agreed, something very distinct about it.
It's really cool to see these kinds of things actually in use. A lot of the time when you see old tech it's mostly just demo'd and maybe a tear down, but that's about it.
yeah it’s annoying. even alot of people that make videos on rare or obscure equipment never show it off in action, even if they have all the stuff to show it off in action and works just fine, won’t show it. they can fix it, and talk about it all day in the video but showing it working? no…
Ikr?
As a long time sun user and administrator many years ago: 1. Administering a cluster of sun's be they desktops or sun-rays isn't that hard. Where as Windows uses Active Directory, Solaris uses NIS. 2. If you don't like csh and prefer bash, just change your profile to use bash in the user administration setup and when you log in you'll get bash. Of course, you'll need the usual bash startup files (.bash_profile, .bash_rc, etc.) instead of the csh ones.
And long ago you would have gotten bourne shell instead of csh. (Shell's are like editors, people are religious about them).
Did a lot of work with Sun Rays when they were around, including running them over the internet to hot desk from office to home. Couple of notes, you can actually chain them together to make up to a 16 display desktop, so one person could have 16 monitors (and 16 sun rays) all tied together to make one super large desktop. Additionally they released the software for Linux late on, which running that on a more modern x86 based CPU may make some of the games you were trying run faster.. the V240 was a lower end server, and usually I ran sun ray servers on much larger servers. I had one running on a Sun F25K for a while. The Intel based ones were way faster than the Sparc ones. I had 30 Sun Rays on 1 2U Sun Intel box that had 4CPUS with like 128GB of ram on it. So technically you can run it against Solaris on Sparc or Intel as well as Linux (can't remember the exact specs on the Linux side)
yeah definitely gonna give an x86 version on a better server a shot someday! that multi head stuff is also cool.
I used to play with those a lot 10-14 years ago.
I had maybe 10-15 sun ray 1 and 20 that was 15 or 17 inch TFTs with built in sun ray.
They also needed powerful 12v power supplies.
I gave a bunch of the clients away and as nobody wanted the rest most got recycled.
I still have some 12v power supplies and use them when I need a powerful 12V psu for different projects.
A cool feature to explore is multi head groups. Check it out if you have time.
Very cool. Yeah multi head looks cool, I haven't tried it yet though. Will be playing with that eventually.
Thats one of the coolest things to experience. Seeing the backwards compatibility with the hardware and software is definitely amazing!
Apple is not a fan of backwards compatibility as their premis is 'innovation' and forcing users to 'new editions' or leave them behind.
This video brings me back. My university had a dedicated Sun Ray lab that I got to use for a few courses. An entire room full of Sun Ray 1's with one half of the room running on one server and the other half running on another. Wasn't set up to use the smart cards though. They'd work pretty well unless you had 25 students compiling something at the same time (which tended to happen at the end of the lab period), then they'd bog down. Video worked way better than you'd expect, and most of the time it didn't feel like you were using a thin client (which is something you couldn't say about using X forwarding, VNC, or Remote Desktop at the time).
Probably the main issue we had with them was the desktop environment. I think the Sun Ray lab was on Solaris 8 which was based on GNOME 1.4. Meanwhile the Linux lab computers were all running a distro with KDE 3.0. So everything felt dated and old despite in many ways it being more technically sophisticated.
At some point they released a Sun Ray Server build for Red Hat Linux that I remember trying (and failing) to get working on my Gentoo machine. That and the soft client would have been light years ahead of any other remote desktop system at the time aside from maybe Citrix.
These seem so much better and easier to manage then modern thin clients 😂
I will say, I'm not doing it at scale or with (any) security concerns... but it kinda just works.
Thank you very much for bringing this content. I have been a Sun server administrator for many years at the beginning of my professional career.
I've routed, installed and administered many SPARC and x86 servers as well as Sun Ray 2 and Sun Ray 3 light terminal farms. I've installed many VDI platforms linking Sun with Windows XP and Windows 7. I can pass you documentation on that to put together maybe a quick video of what it was like.
Then Oracle came along, and shut down everything related to Sun Ray terminals.
Please don't stop uploading content with Sun equipment. 🤓
Very cool! What was the largest Sun Ray install you managed? You can reach me at the email in the channel about page to send docs... usually Oracle still hosts all the Sun documentation on these (amazingly), but I haven't started looking into how to get the Windows stuff working yet.
I had the honor of using both a Sunray 1 and a SunRay 2 at my desk and at in home while working for SunOracle. Something about them remains futuristic even though the last time I used one was in 2017
I like that you do more than “I got this old server running” and then move on to the next topic.
Great video. I remember Sun very well, it was my introduction to Unix world and serious IT in general. Luckily my Uni had a friendly Solaris admin that helped my in my 1st steps. That was golden years!
We used to have a PC lab with sun rays in my University. The lab was aimed for the IT students. Wrote most of my C/C++ exercises on these machines. Never had an issue with them. Thin clients were pretty impressive back in the day. The lab was also noticeably cooler and quieter than the standard Windows PC labs.
Great to see all this Sun content. I was a Solaris system admin as part of my job for years. I haven’t been near any in over 5 years. Brings back some great memories.
Very cool!
Well, I'm excited to see systems like these. As a SYS admin today it's incredibly interesting to see these old enterprise systems running. Wondering what the power usage is for these systems including server.
This is the kinda stuff I would do on the weekends for fun.
It was quite common for the stands on the Sun Ray 1 to break, often they would split down the seam where the two halves of it was joined together.
Regarding the Sun Ray 2FS, when Sun starts to manufacture a new product it would build a small batch of them first as a design verification test, hence the DVT label on the unit, these machines would be built and then undergo extensive testing. After that a larger batch of the product would be built as a process/production verification test, known as PVT, once these processes had been completed and passed the product would then go into full production. At least as far as I can recall.
Interesting! Some others have said the same thing about DVT, so that makes sense. Unfortunate this one got hurt -- if the ebay seller just refunds me I'll get it put back together though.
Back in 2015 I acquired a Sun Ray one...with the plastic stand mostly intact. Not sure what to do with it. But this series might inspire me to do something....
Fun fact: Various DoD support agencies (which will remain unamed) used these Sun ray thin clients into the early 2010s....
I have heard about DoD using Sun Fire servers but hadn't heard about any Sun Ray use, that's cool. Yeah give that Sun Ray a try!
My grandfather was a professor at Weber State for 40 years. He implemented the sun rays technology throughout the computer science department. However the campus was mostly windows. So there was a lot of push back.
I used to have a 2FS on my desk in 2010-2014? With dual monitors. Ours were set up with RDP clients, so I'd use my Java card to log into Solaris, and then use "Trusted Path" to connect to Terminal Services and get a Windows session. We had a few different servers that we could connect to at different classification levels, and Trusted Path made sure that we couldn't copy and paste from high to low, etc. It was pretty neat. The mobile session thing was also greatly appreciated. I could set up a presentation, pull my card, drive 100 miles to the headquarters, and my ready to go presentation would be waiting for me when I put my card into the Sun Ray in the conference room. Later on, we started getting Sun Ray 3 clients, which were nicknamed "toasters" due to the card slot being on the top of the machine.
Very awesome! I've heard other stories from folks that really liked using it for presentations.
From the description, it sounds like you worked for a defense contractor or an arm of the military.
@@jeremyjedynak You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment
Loved seeing the CDE, haven’t seen it since university, early 2000’s it was a nice memory bump.
Love the content
I subscribed with the last video on the Sun Rays... I can't wait to see the other videos, you're really covering these well!
Thank you!
From what I can gather (I’ve never used these), you could get these working with a modern Linux install because they’re all based on X forwarding. Unix/Linux stuff is neat.
You could forward an X application to the SunFire server as that is where the X display software is running, not on the Sun Ray terminal, those speak a proprietary protocol that is more like RDP or VNC, just slinging the framebuffer across the network from the SunFire server where everything actually runs.
The SunRay software was available for Linux, and GDM was patched with native support.
Ahh. I must have misread the exact specifics of the Ubuntu Wiki page on the topic. Troelshansen6650 notes that the sun ray server software was ported to Linux so theory states you can get it working with a Linux box. Actual mileage probably varies.
I used to have a think client on my desk back in 2009 I believe. We had Sun, AIX, Windows & some other systems in the closet at the company - did software for document processing back then for banks, insurance companies and such and they ran batch jobs on oooooooooold systems.
This whole series is great! Your videos have persuaded me into buying an old Sun Fire V100.
Thanks! And nice!
One university I studied on had the Sun Ray 2 computer room. We had there only CDE - pain in the ass to use it - it was slow and we learned linux on it. Also we had RDP access to those servers and could test our C programs there... what I can say - on Ubuntu and windows the program run differently than on Sun :) Year was 2011. I thing they might ditch Sun Ray in later years. I left after 2011 to another Uni, but the experience is still vivid :D
I've really enjoyed this video series. Seeing Real Player was a blast from the past that I had on the Windows side. Too bad these didn't take off these would have been great to have in my public school.
You can use vi editing shortcuts in the C shell. Do a set -o vi, then use esc-k to go up a line, j to go down, l to move the cursor right and h to move it left. Or just do what you did and launch bash.
I need a hot desking thin client product like this in 2023, and probably for the next 10 years.
This hasn’t gone out of style (Solaris and Java definitely have)
CDE !!! Used that at uni 25yrs ago via an NCD client. At the time, seemed quite clean/simple after years of Win98 fluorescence… Happy times learning C++ on these…😁
“Along with the serial port here.” *shows the Serial Port channel logo* 4:52 😭😭😭
great walk through some Sun history
My university had a bunch of these in the library (along with Macs and Windows PCs). They were indeed mainly used for web surfing and productivity tasks. It was pretty cool that a bunch of random college kids could just use a real Unix for basic stuff. I respected the pedigree but Solaris itself didn't seem to offer much that Linux didn't already have to me on my local machine.
Actually i have a few unused dells wyse thin clients in the office. They're still good. Watching your video has given me the idea to revive them on a linux terminal server. They can be useful iin the office as extra terminals ..
So many office tasks are so low powered, computer wise, that for many you would be fine.
@@paulstubbs7678 we've actually deployed mostly cloud services since 2021. All users on office 365, from on premise, and using outlook word excel in browser, Asana as a work management platform and all our other services are cloud based. We've moved away from expensive PC's to minisforum or equivalent. We had a previous VDI deployment and the Wyse clients are now just sitting somewhere in the server room. Linux is a perfect open source option to get them back up and install around the building where new staff can use them or when we have interns..
I'm enjoying this series, glad to hear you have more ideas!
Really cool content as always! You’re the reason I got into Sun stuff, keep the videos coming.
Thanks! More videos on the way.
DVT - digital validation testing. So it may not be prototype hardware (that would be EVT), but might still have prototype software or bios on it.
Ah yeah, that definitely confirms it was an early one though.
Lookin forward to part 3!
We had a bunch of Sun Rays in high school - they switched us from dedicated computers running Novell Netware on XP to Oracle's virtual desktop infrastructure. They didn't do a great job with the transition though because performance was horrible so everyone hated them. I'm pretty sure that was an issue with their virtualization environment and not the Sun Rays though.
The only neat thing was that they also gave us remote access to our machines from home, although you had to book time slots in advance for some reason lol. Why they didn't just switch over to a normal Windows domain environment + maybe some terminal servers is beyond me though, since all that stuff was readily available in the late 00s and surely must have been less... out there.
Very interesting. Yeah that's not the first time I've heard about performance complaints with that setup.
Awesome video! The Sun Ray 1 is just a bit older than me.
Very cool, I kinda want to mess around with modern thin clients
This is amazing! Did you try playing with kiosk mode to RDP to windows? Would be fun to see this thing with win10!
Not yet! I'll be playing around with that in a follow up!
Great! Looking forward to it. Keep up the great work!
Very interesting video. I wonder how much cheaper buying a fleet of Sun Ray would have been compared to a dedicated desktop for each person in an office. It's just fashinating how in a couple of years laters PCs and laptops became dirt cheap.
I think one of the factors that killed these off was PCs getting insanely cheap in the mid 2000s (relative to just a few years earlier). There are of course thin client installs to this day, but it definitely didn't take off the way proponents of them thought they would.
My high school had a computer room with Citrix thin clients back in 2006-2008. It taught me true hatred for thin clients.
Love the Sun content! You've inspired me to try and get a solaris install running so i can mess around with mine! One of my 270s won't boot though, so if you need one for parts or want to try to get it working I'd be happy to ship it!
Thanks! Yeah you can reach me at the email in the channel about page about the 270. That shipping might be wild though haha
So, the csh variant you should look at is tcsh. It behaves pretty much the same way as csh but has all the nice bash things like command line completion, history and customisable shell prompt. I learnt tcsh in my uni days some 35 years ago on Ultrix.
Oh thanks, I'll check tcsh out.
I had to learn one of my programming classes in college (I think C maybe) on a java station. And this was in 2013 or 14 haha. This is a flashback
haha wow!
Basically X-Windows terminals with a smart card. At the time. far cheaper than deploying Sun workstations. X-Windows was developed at MIT and had the tech for remotely sending / receiving display kb/mouse over the network for many years prior to Sun making it rather easy to setup. I remember the Xroaches program and the engineers remotely running it on the secretaries X-Windows session. She would move a window and digital roaches would scatter then hide under the remaining windows. You'd hear the screams across the office.
Not quite, the protocol between the Sun Ray and the SunFire server is _not_ X it's a proprietary protocol more like VNC or RDP, although the X display server software does run on the server. X can't support hot-desking or reconnection because the display server is _not_ stateless, any X-compatible remote desktop that supports those features is running a full screen session on the server and sending the composited frame-buffer, not X, across the network.
The protocol used in SunRay was much more robust against high latency networks (which enabled them to be used on VPN connections). X11 was completely unusable on anything other than LAN.
I really like the idea of these. Since the 2019 thing I have been coding over rdp because it pays to have my workstation near the servers.
Looks like a period-correct 2005 dell monitor too... I couldn't help but wonder if a chromecast with google tv could be repurposed to the same task without the smart card support, maybe with a custom android app.
Always liked terminal pc and servers. when i was student at the university 2002-03 was work LTSP ( Linux Terminal Server Project). Linux version of Sun Solaris :)
I used to deal with these for work back in the day, thought they were super cool. I had them running around the house for quick web terminals. Kitchen recipe computer anyone? ;)
Amazing tech, especially considering the era! RDS and VDI have been gaining popularity in the past decade but it took a long time to become really usable and clients are not nearly as plug and play as these.
Modern security requirements play a part in that as well, of course.
14:09 no wonder TSP said that you could keep that ailing *Sun Ray 1*
sounds like they foisted that thing on you, Clab 😆
😂 I'll get that thing re-capped eventually
I have always been interested in Sun Systems hardware, being able to log in from any machine and having a low power thin client seem like a win to me considering alot of office work does not need to be MS office based only.
4:20 IEEE connector? You mean IEC connector? (Specifically IEC 60320 C13).
Yeah, I misspoke.
My school swapped all the old ass desktops and CRTs for the 2 thin clients and TFT monitors and at the time this was really unheard of at schools in the UK, using linux especially, I thought it was amazing, it stopped all the kids plugging in there USBs with dodgy stuff on, and getting around restrictions :P
I would love to see a non-destructive teardown of the Sun Ray 1 to get some insight in what architecture they are based on.
I've got a couple broken Sun Rays that need repair, so maybe I can sneak a Sun Ray 1 teardown in a video as well someday.
@@clabretro That would be awesome
You should do a video series on Novell directory, architecture and system, My local community college used that system for their network authentication servers basically up until 2018 when they finally switched to Microsoft's active directory. Yet everyone else was using active directory since it first came out. I remember using active directory in middle school on Windows XP and I still use it in my home environment for my gaming room
Also do series revolving around retro apple Enterprise stuff like the Apple XServe series of servers, apples, open directory, Apple's network boot deployment services and Apple remote desktop. I used all the Apple stuff back in high school because my high school was all Mac except for the one business science course lab which had windows XP
Net boot on Mac OS x leopard up until I believe Yosemite allowed you to basically turn a bunch of Inacs into thin client type devices. You would have a net boot server on the network running the images and if you took the hard drives out of the macs and used apples enterprise management functions of Mac OSX server you could basically force those computers to boot from the network image by default
OS X net boot was really cool, that'd be a neat video (I only have one old Mac though, ha). I'd like to cover Novell eventually as well, I actually have a complete in box copy of NetWare Lite v1.1.
Thanks so much for great content that real player took me back in time.
Soon we back with thin clients and all applications run on a server, the history repeats itself 😊
Ain’t that so true…. My windows virtual “pc” is so much more accessible in my workplace. Can login from home, change seat/floor in office seamlessly. Sun nailed it first and properly !
Was going to sleep, though no…. It’s Sun Microsystems time 🎉
😂
In my time zone, it's 6:30 AM.
I love your videos.
I have a Sun Ray 1 (with stand), a Sun Ray 2 and a V210 and V490 for servers (and a V890 with 8 ultraSPARC IV+ and 32 GB RAM but it is too expensive in terms of electricity to play much around with it).
I have not tried to get the SunRAY's running, but your videos make my fingers itch.
I even have a SunPCI II pro in my V490 which I never tried out. I wait for your video about your SunPCI III.
Which Java-Cards are compatible with the SunRay's?
Please keep up your great work.
These, in theory: shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/SunRay1/component.smartcards.html
I bought these on Amazon and haven't gotten them to work, but I suspect they're just unprogrammed: www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09BVMZC97
I've heard credit cards will work, but haven't tried it yet. I'll put out an update video on it if I can figure out a third party option.
The Sun Rays are still worth playing with! Still very cool even without the cards.
Makes me ponder how it would be to have a slew of concurrent users on a server.
And if load balancing between servers were a thing and if such how dynamic was that. Could it toss around active sessions, or just offline ones.
And how big of a server could one theoretically get at the time? 4-16 sockets, or more? So many curiosities about the back end of things left hanging here.
I remember trying the Java Desktop on Solaris x86 and I had to laugh really hard. An uninspired gnome nearly unusable. It is really sad - I think Sun should have put much more efforts in a better gnome port.
Thank you for showing how the netclients worked.
Agreed!
A couple v880s running pc link and a bunch of sunray 150 is what I started says admin on back in 2004
Csh does not have bash style history. Tenex csh, tcsh does have history but it works differently from bash.
Its interesting that I use a remote network desktop for work today. My "thin client" is a thinkpad x1 carbon with a highly customized windows 10 install. Nomachine NX connexts me to my "desktop" a linux desktop on some remote server. Dunno what voodo magic its using but i can evwn watch youtube on it.
We even have hotel desks where i can login and attach to the same session.
DVT#11 suggests it's a late prototype, DVT usually stands for Design Verification Test.
ah, interesting! yeah that's a bummer. if the ebay seller just ends up refunding I'll get it put back together.
Very cool demonstration, buddy. Hope your channel blows up. 🙂
I have something even more retro, a SparcStation SLC (or maybe elc, it’s not marked), it’s a 25 or 33mhz sparc system in a 17inch monochrome crt. If you are anywhere near Arizona I’d be happy to give it to you.
I'm not too far away, maybe we can work something out. Reach out to the email in the channel's about page if you have a chance!
Would you believe that my old job used Solaris 10 and UltraSPARC cpu with 2 GB ram until 2018. I actually miss using it. Now, we use redhat.
That's pretty amazing (and hard to believe). What type of work were you doing on it?
@clabretro I was a UAS Operator for the Army, and our ground control station ran ultrasparc IIi 650 mhz cpu's. A lot of military C4I Systems were Solaris. They have mostly moved on to other computing systems. The RQ-7B finally got all its systems upgraded 2020. I do miss that ultrasparc computer though.
@@tech-vp5xe that's awesome to hear about. those ultrasparc IIis were getting old by then! I haven't heard anything specifically about the government using Solaris, so this is really cool to hear.
cool how that had the card to log into the network, and move your work with you!
that's awesome! 😀👍
so the card basically had your log in info on it, and then if you moved to another machine, it would log you onto your account, but on a different client? I assume that is how it worked. . . .
Yup, your session is saved on the server.
I definitely found it interesting. Keep 'em coming!
Thanks! Will do!
I did manage to find some brochures on the 270
Recalling from back in the day (which was quite a while ago) -- yes there's no command editing (which includes the uparrow through history) in csh. But it should have history, and I'm surprised there is no command. First you have to set history=n for a history buffer of n commands (normally in .cshrc). One normally invokes the command history with "!". So "!!" on a line by itself should re-run the last command and "!e" should re-run the last command that began with an "e". “!20” will run command number 20. (I just checked all this in a 4.3BSD on SIMH. Perhaps there is an issue with versions of csh?)
You’re right - just run bash!
Didn't even think to try the various "!" commands, even though I use it in bash all the time ha.
Not really having used csh (aside, was that what was default in MacOSX
Definitely: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_shell. csh syntax is far more like a "normal" programming language vs. bash.
@@MarkTinberg love to see some fish rep
these were the future i wanted a sunray so bad sun was the best
14:00 - I would be the rebooting issue is bad caps in the PSU, as you mentioned had to be replaced sometimes.
Once it gets up to temperature, the cap(s) fail and power becomes too unstable and it reboots, the hanging could also be indicative of this issue.
Unstable power can make computers behave very strangely.
I think you're right, PSU caps. I'll be taking a look in there next time I mess around with it.
Is that wallpaper on the Sun Ray 1 available anywhere for download? Love that aesthetic
Here ya go: imgur.com/vkNHYED
Hey thank you bro! Just found your channel today actually, huge fan of your content and vibe! solid stuff bro!@@clabretro
thanks!
7:38 I recently finished that book 😅
Dude, these videos are so cool. Keep this up. I love your commentary.
I sort of wonder when the thin client becomes the usability bottleneck. How far could you power up the server before the thin clients' latency and hardware limitations become the lowest common denominator?
Thanks! Yeah good question. Maybe someday I'll host the server software on a VM with a ton of resources and see if there's a difference.
4:46 kids these days would take that Kensington lock for a usb type c connector. 😂
At scale ? Looking at this: NFS/NIS/NIS+/LDAP should centralize the user parts (username/password and user profile files), I don't know about the connecting of the cards to the user, my guess is they are also handled by NIS/NIS+/LDAP ?
And that would be it, you'd have a server for every X users desks which would run the applications for those users and that's it. You already mentioned the jump-start server. Doesn't sound to bad to me !
Happy to be one of the first! I love your content. Keep up the good work!
thanks!
i got a sunray 1 at goodwill for like 3 bucks with the stand and never knew what it was or did
ha nice!
AMAZING - I used CDE for years and didn't even know it had a name ;--)
i feel the urge to use my second server and rebuild this with modern software... (pxe, etc)
What a great corp Sun was! 😭
I still think that work computers could do with something like this. it would be a dream to just slam your badge into the computer and be logged in in seconds, no password or anything after first login
a lot of business laptops so have a smart card reader so it is possible to do.
Oh my gosh. The administrative overhead of running that system would have been a pain in the backside. Wow.