Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10

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/proceedin...

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

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!

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.

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-...

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.