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URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Using Sun Ray thin clients in 2025
pmw wrote 6 hours 25 min ago:
Everyone now has fondness for these and for thin clients in general,
but I donât see this concept used in modern times. Is there any
modern equivalent, in particular with the power of a workstation rather
than a kiosk? Amazonâs WorkSpaces is anemicâ low memory and high
price, with their own marketing proposing it for contact centers and
front desks. What modern thin client solution can truly replace full
computers, especially with local / on-prem processing?
jwoglom wrote 9 hours 11 min ago:
I never had much more than a passing familiarity with Solaris, so
setting up SunRay's with OpenIndiana isn't something I've ever tried --
but the SunRay Server software actually supported Debian Linux! It is,
obviously, similarly broken in the modern era, but I imagine it's
possible to get working... some of the required files are at
URI [1]: https://github.com/jwoglom/srs
dillona wrote 9 hours 44 min ago:
The Sun Ray is a strong inspiration for building [1] (currently in
closed beta).
The main challenge has been building a modern remote desktop protocol
that achieves high performance but without requiring GPUs for each user
and works on Linux. VNC is really showing its age, and X forwarding
isn't really usable over the Internet. We are also using Yubikeys
instead of smart cards, though I'm looking forward to testing some of
the FIDO2 cards that are on the market.
One of our colleagues said something that really resonated with me
"When you're working using our system it should feel like you're
sitting down at a personal supercomputer". There are always more
features to build, but the basic vision of being able to sit down at
any desk with our Warpbox and connect to your virtual desktop within a
few seconds is a really nice workflow.
URI [1]: https://warpstations.com
aggregator-ios wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
This looks really cool. I didn't quite understand what the product
did on the website, but once I read your comment, I got it.
Is there a short trial period before I pay? I didn't see it on the
website. If it really does feel like real time usage like GeForce Now
with gaming, then that is seriously cool.
dillona wrote 9 hours 10 min ago:
Thank you for the feedback about the website. I'd love to hear more
of your thoughts about what was unclear or how we could improve if
you can email me (email in profile).
I'd be glad to set you up with credits to run the system through
its paces. Right now our most valuable payment is feedback
aggregator-ios wrote 8 hours 7 min ago:
Done!
grishka wrote 10 hours 46 min ago:
Oh we had a bunch of Sun thin clients in my university, in a dedicated
room where we went to get tortured with various tests. They were
complete sets, with Sun branded monitors, keyboards, and mice. The
system you got into was something very stripped-down unix-like
(probably Solaris, but at the time I assumed it was Linux), and it ran
only two things: Firefox that could only access the testing website,
and a timer counting down your booked session time. The smart card
functionality was completely unused. They turned those things on
remotely for you when you checked in at the reception.
p.s. what's up with the capitalization in this article? Sentences not
starting with capital letters are harder to read.
gedy wrote 9 hours 35 min ago:
> p.s. what's up with the capitalization in this article?
It's some irritating trend with a few folks. Like an "oh im too busy
to bother with that".
gt0 wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
Great to see. I used them at my work almost 20 years ago, I had one at
home too for easy access. I later got a Tadpole Comet Sun Ray laptop
purely for nerd reasons.
With modern network speeds it's interesting to consider how good a thin
client could be these days.
dillona wrote 9 hours 36 min ago:
At our company (almost entirely engineers) we're pretty near 100%
thin client usage. It's nice to be able to "download more RAM" for a
big analysis job and not have to go try to buy a new system or
something.
I also travel a lot, and it's great to have all of my applications
and data right where I left them from any desk in any office
gt0 wrote 6 hours 10 min ago:
Nice, what thin clients are you using? After Sun Ray, I tried an
Axel one, but never really found a use case for it.
dillona wrote 35 min ago:
Originally we used PCoIP server software and various Zero Clients
(they all run the same software). Their video performance is
really great, but we found it very difficult to get support for
basically anything else (USB, licensing, host OS, etc).
One thing lead to another and now we're building our own server
software, thin client OS (no hardware yet, we load our image on
COTS x86 devices), and public VDI cloud.
motohagiography wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
someone should reboot the Sun brand as a super high end laptop and
workstation company. ~$10k price point. GPU or future tech, native
virtualization to run simultaneous OS images, modular and upgradable
like framework's products, droppable ruggedization, sim card and
isolated secure element as a crypto module, same day replacement
delivery worldwide.
could do the same with Atari, Cray, even a rebrand of SGI to Silicon
General Intelligence. I miss muscular tech like that.
dillona wrote 9 hours 25 min ago:
I'm extremely jealous of Cloudflare getting the trademark for The
Network is the Computer ( [1] )
URI [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-network-is-the-computer/
zeckalpha wrote 9 hours 46 min ago:
Oracle wouldn't let you do that with Sun.
Atari has been brought back! [1] HPE is using the Cray brand: [2]
Coincidentally, [3] redirects to the HPE Cray link above.
URI [1]: https://atari.com
URI [2]: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/compute/hpc/supercomputing/cray-ex...
URI [3]: https://www.sgi.com/
motohagiography wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
the Atari brand is cute, but those products are a bit schmaltzy. we
should find a way to get control of one of these brands and do an
LBO of an OEM like framework or system76 for manufacturing. Apple
is out of ideas and they're never going to make it in enterprise,
it seems like an opportunity.
rtpg wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
Gotta say that the card sticking out of the screen of the SunRay 270
looks properly goofy.
It does feel like a bunch of universities in particular could have
taken advantage of something like this. Something akin to the laptop
"close the lid and just open it back later whenever", but on all the
desktops on campus. Sounds amazing in theory!
Probably a nightmare in practice to deal with though. There's so many
advantages to having people turn off their machines.
Procrastes wrote 9 hours 35 min ago:
That's definitely how we worked at the Sun offices. And since we
hoteled, I never knew where I would be sitting. I loved it really. It
felt very minimalist and slick.
DaSHacka wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
That would be perfect, doubly so if the university switched to
FIPS201-like student IDs for their door access too.
Just imagine, one ID that would work for both doors and computer
access, no need for clunky username/password+2FA juggling. Just tap
your card (and optionally, if a institution chooses, enter a pin for
a second factor), and you're off to the races.
This could easily be implemented through mobile phones too, since
most have NFC nowadays, if cost of credentials that can do asymmetric
operations is a concern.
Of course, this would never happen, as both Academia and Access
Control are extremely slow-moving fields stuck with decades of legacy
solutions. The vast, vast majority of institutions still use what
amounts to static unchanging ""passwords"" sent across the wire
(usually unencrypted!) to authenticate users.
This is something I've been thinking of for a long time, and had no
idea Sun had beat me to the punch long before I was even born! What a
shame, they were really ahead of their time.
jeffbee wrote 10 hours 46 min ago:
I don't know if any universities did that but it was reality in some
health care and government installations. You just slapped your card
into any terminal and all your apps sprang up on the screen right
where they had been.
Nextgrid wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
I wonder how difficult it would be to just take a packet capture of
such a client booting up and connecting and then building a server from
scratch - something that would convert between the Sun Ray protocol and
bog-standard VNC. This would save a lot of the setup process and allow
these clients to be used plug and play by just running a single server
binary.
jwoglom wrote 9 hours 9 min ago:
This has actually already been done! It just needs some love:
URI [1]: https://github.com/classilla/kopenray
insaneirish wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
Sun Rays were so good. Being able to walk over to someone else's desk
and say "hey, take a look at this" and swap your card for theirs and
instantly have your desktop was such a great user experience.
Also enjoyed the keyboards (with control where caps lock "normally"
is)...
bcantrill wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
This is hot! I -- like maybe everyone at Sun in the late 1990s and
early 2000s? -- had a soft spot for SunRay. The original SunRay demo
from Duane Northcutt to the Solaris Kernel Group in February 1999 (when
it was a Sun Labs project code-named Corona) was just... jaw-dropping.
Later, it was a point of personal pride that one of the first,
concrete, production use-cases for DTrace came on a SunRay server (an
experience that we outlined in §9 of our USENIX paper[0]). I'll
always be sentimental about SunRay -- and Sun's misexecution with
respect to SunRay was a lingering disappointment for many of us.
[0]
URI [1]: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings...
sys_64738 wrote 11 hours 0 min ago:
Oracle killed it and we all moved to Windows PCs.
bcantrill wrote 8 hours 54 min ago:
Long before Oracle killed it, Sun fumbled it, sadly. The failure
of SunRay to live up to its potential -- and it clearly had
tremendous potential -- was Sun at its most frustrating: the
company tended to became disinterested in things at exactly the
moment that really called for focus.
As a concrete example, the failure to add USB printing support
killed SunRay at airline kiosks in the early 2000s. American
Airlines was the first airline to adopt kiosk-based check-in; they
were very hot on SunRay, but needed USB printing. When American
found out that Sun had just gutted the team (including everyone
responsible for USB support!), they (reluctantly!) used
Windows-based PCs instead. Sun tried to put the group back
together, but it was too late -- and every airline followed
American's lead.
Could/would SunRay have been used for airline kiosks? There are
reasons to believe that it would have -- and it was certainly a
better technical fit than an entire Windows PC.
There were examples like this all over the place, not just with
SunRay but at Sun more broadly; despite the terrific building
blocks, Sun often lacked the patience and focus to add the polish
needed for a real product. (Our frustration with Sun in this regard
led us to start Fishworks in 2006.[0])
RIP SunRay -- and what could have been!
[0]
URI [1]: https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-c...
yjftsjthsd-h wrote 11 hours 18 min ago:
It might also be interesting to try [1] which is GPLv2 and works with
newer JDKs.
URI [1]: https://github.com/jwoglom/srs
yjftsjthsd-h wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
Edit but passed the window... Wrong link, should be
URI [1]: https://github.com/classilla/kopenray
emdashcomma wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
I love these things. If you want to see them in action on video, check
out clabretro on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@clabretro (e.g., [1] ).
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRO_M1S145M
shawnz wrote 10 hours 17 min ago:
The Phintage Collector also recently did some videos on Sun Ray:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj_TktVOrtQ
crmd wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
One of my favorite YouTube channels. I have such a nostalgic soft
spot for late 90s to mid 2000s enterprise network and server tech :-)
treve wrote 11 hours 7 min ago:
This youtube channel was an absolute rabbit hole for me.
protocolture wrote 12 hours 4 min ago:
I had trouble getting HP thin clients going when they were just months
out of support. This is a mammoth undertaking, not to mention amazing
documentation for anyone stuck with this technical debt.
theandrewbailey wrote 13 min ago:
I work at an e-waste recycling company. I had about 120
decommissioned HP thin clients come in last week. I'm still trying to
figure out what to do with them. We have buyers that might be
interested in them. I opened them all up and they all had 8 GB RAM
and 128 GB SSD. While grinding through them, I realized that was more
than the laptop I went to college with ~18 years ago. I haven't
turned any on, but I would not be surprised if the CPUs in them are
faster too. I didn't realize thin clients/dumb terminals had to be so
powerful these days.
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