On Wed, 7 Jul 2010, Wim Coekaerts wrote:
Hi all,
aside from the obvious issue with colormask (WIP) and yes it's clearly a big
deal that is going to be addressed - what else is there that you'd want to
see?
Hi!
We switched from custom-built workstations with Fedora to Sun Ray Linux
(RHEL) 4 years ago. We are overall pleased with the result but there are
some quirks.
I read most of the replies and agree with all of it and I will add some of
my own experiences. First I reply to the questions you brought up and then
I add some own.
Given that we have Oracle Enterprise Linux (which btw is a -free- download
and -free- use - it doesn't require support subscriptions if you don't want
support nor does it require support subscriptions to just download) of course
we are going to make sure that that's fully supported and on par with Solaris
and make it easy to install/package etc...
It sounds nice, but as several pointed out - I used many distros thruout
the years, I was a diehard Slackware user, but when Ubuntu came it was
just great, debian done right. I use it on everything that I want Linux on
except the Sun Ray servers.
If you would make your own Oracle Enterprise Linux how could it compete
with RHEL or Ubuntu? Would you provide more packages than RHEL? Would you
have better upgrade possibilities than RHEL? We are a non-profit
organisation so we have no satelite server, we download everything from
redhat.com. Irony is that we have a really fast connection, but RedHat
doesn't - Ubuntu let's me keep a local repository of packages.
And when you release this OEL will it be fast, low footprint and will it
always be free or will you change your mind and charge different prices
for the OS (like Sun did with Solaris every now and then) or will you give
it out for free first and then add on a ridiculous price later on (like
_YOU_ did with the very important BIOS-upgrades for the end-of-life
SunFire servers)?
I like to build solutions on Ubuntu cause I trust it to be available for a
looong time.
I feel safe building solutions on RHEL cause I know some RHEL people where
I live, I buy licenses from them and they lowered the price each year and
I feel pretty safe it is going to be like this for a couple of years more,
otherwise I'll just move to Ubuntu.
I have seen a number of folks running ubuntu but that by itself is quite a
bit different in terms of packaging and quite frankly work/effort but I would
like to understand what in particular attracts folks to using ubuntu for sun
rays. is there anything that we are missing in OEL in particular, what is it
that you are looking for that's not there ?
When we bought the Sun Rays we first tried Solaris x86. It was easy to
install and many Sun Ray functions were there. But we were lacking a
functional (userfriendly) desktop environment and we had problems with
Maple and Matlab - and Acroread wasn't even available by then. A Sun
salesman visited us and said we should've bought their UltraSPARC servers
instead of the opteron ones (costs four times more), that was ridiculous.
Then they suggested we could run like some clone, i.e. evince (which
wasn't as good at the time). After that they suggested that we set up a
linuxserver by the side for the sole purpose of letting people log in and
start acroread.
So we went with RHEL.
Now RHEL has dropped support for many programs we use, and Google Chrome
is like impossible to set up so we are shopping for alternatives. Sun Ray
Ubuntu (i.e. Ubuntu LTS) would be a dream come true.
also re ubuntu : there really are 2 ways to look at it, one is to use VDI and
run ubuntu desktops with oracle vdi the other is the standard sun ray server
install directly on ubuntu. first one is there today , second one is just,
as I said, a lot different than supporting rhel or oel and you can do if you
hack your stuff together today.
Of course Ubuntu is different than RHEL, that is why so many are using it.
virtualizing - is anyone running sun ray server virtualized ? would it help
if we made full images available for download (would be for Oracle VM - btw
also free download and use) that contained OEL and Sun Ray Server
pre-installed and preconfigured for the standard setup ?
It would be interesting, we tried it a little. But RHEL 5 wont even get
past the installer in VirtualBox on Ubuntu so we have very limited
experience.
Also, RHEL + Sun Ray Server installs in very little time (I even have most
of it scripted, and all of it documented so a person with less than a
years linux experience could do it.)
Red Hat suggested that I install Sun Ray on RHEL on KVM on RHEL but I
don't see the benefit, I would get two systems needed patching instead of
one. Whenever a local exploit comes for RHEL I still need to
reboot/reinstall the Sun Ray Server.
Now on to the other problems I had...
First off, using a USB-stick is pain. It often doesn't work, it crashes
the servers sometimes or just freezes the USB functionality. And when it
works it doesn't show up any icon on the desktop and how hard as it may
seem, not all my users think it is intiutive to open up a Terminal and
start using ut-commands. For this sole purpose we setup a dedicated
workstation for people to use their USB-sticks. We've gotten many
complaints about this but we can't do much about it. When we spoke to Sun
concerning this they only said "just read the manual". On this point it
almost seems obvious that the manual was written before the software.
Then there's stability. The DTUs are great and much better than PC
workstations that get hardware failure all the time. We only need to reset
a DTU like 2-3 times a month. (In Solaris it is less often). It almost
always depends on the version of the SRSS, they are all different. My
"favourite" is when a user logs in, then gets a powerfailure (or we insert
a smart card and take it out). The DTU sometimes finds it session again,
sometimes not. Then you can restart the DTU and it might find back (if it
jumped server that is) but if it starts a new sessions on the same server
you are just stuck until an admin comes and cleans out all the sessions
including all the programs that the user had open that creates lockfiles
etc. Starting KDE often crashes the entire server, including KDE-apps, so
KDE is banned at our place.
We moved from RHEL 4 to RHEL 5 so we could run Firefox 3.x. Now RHEL 5
takes more cpu and for some reason SRSS takes more load. Today we are
three users (me and two secretaries) and the load is between 3.5 and 4.7
on a quadcore opteron 2,6 GHz with 16GB ram. The sound in my MP3 player
stutters. Most cpu is taken by a process called GDM, if I kill it all DTUs
die. On an idle system the load can be around 2.5. I've mentioned this on
the list but without success.
Another thing I've been missing in Sun Ray is IPv6. I haven't read up on
the latest info but there's no IPv6 in the server I'm using right now, and
the DTUs are heavily dependent on DHCP, a technology not really there in
IPv6. You can whine all you like about "IPv6 is not here yet" and so on, I
don't care. I've been using it since 1999, I've had it in serious
production since 2008, I support it fully to all my users. And we are
required by our ISP since 2004 to not buy products that are IPv4-only. I
really hope Sun Ray will be the default thin-client technology of the
future. IPv6 is already here and everybody will be forced to use it,
whether they want to or not and when that day comes the advantage is to
the ones with the most experience. Today the fields where we just can't
deploy IPv6 in our organization are parts of the Solaris servers and Sun
Ray, the rest is more or less already done.
Also, a short notice on Sun Ray advocacy You should hand out DTUs to
computer clubs! Cause there are the future admins born. Every admin I know
personally I met in a computer club at a university or college. Another
thing, the license - it is really hard to understand, I mean, really hard
and confusing. I've seen people refuse to put DTUs on their networks cause
they couldn't understand the license.
Consider this lengthy email my contribution to the feedback-request. Sun
Ray is excellent, I'm an advocate. Sun Ray is the best technology within
desktop computing right now. But Sun Ray is not ready.
If something in my email sounded harsh or had a strong tone, please point
it out, I'm happy to proven wrong so I can go on being more positive.
Greetings to everybody on the list!
-- Alexander
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alexander Koponen System Administrator
Institut Mittag-Leffler phone: +46 8 622 05 75
Auravagen 17 fax: +46 8 622 05 89
SE-182 60 DJURSHOLM [email protected]
SWEDEN http://www.mittag-leffler.se/
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