2012-01-21 16:14, Lennert Van Alboom wrote:
Hello there,
I have a bunch of headless machines that do have desktops (older UNIX,
etc).
Currently I load that desktop either by reconnecting my monitor,
keyboard and
mouse to whatever machine I want to work on, but that's fairly
cumbersome. I've
started using Xnest to connect via XDMCP to the machines, which is
workable;
however, I'd like to have a thin client to do that for me.
A Sun Ray 270 looks like a nice option (a 3i would be nice as well, but
those
are hard to find and/or expensive). I can't find much info on using it as a
plain thin client though, so I've got a few questions:
- Is it possible to use a Sun Ray thin client as a 'standalone' client,
as in,
without the sun ray server software installed on the other end?
- If yes, what protocols does it speak? Can it do rdesktop, xdmcp, ...?
Unfortunately for you, no. SRSS must be on the other end;
it speaks the sunray protocol to your terminal (DTU) and
other protocols to respective X11/VNC/RDP/... servers that
you would want to talk to.
Sun terminals by design have no software on-board, only
the small (400kb) firmware, so they have minimal possible
attack surface on themselves. The rest of security, config
and backup is done on server infrastructure (away from
users and maintained by pros) ;)
I am not sure how useful to you would be to have one DTU,
but if you have several at your home - you could hotdesk
to your session from several locations.
>
> - Is the client limited to one server,
The client itself only connects to one server at a time.
You can do failover (see failover groups = FOGs in the
docs), you can utswitch, or you can use the GUI menu
of the current firmwares to specify a server to connect
to upon boot - and reset the DTU.
You can also use DHCP and/or DNS to specify the current
server, but that's probably too cumbersome for your task :)
> or can you preconfigure multiple
> 'servers' to connect to that you can choose via a menu of some kind?
In Kiosk mode (at least) you can make a menu to select
VNC and RDP servers to connect to (I published a simple
framework for that on the Sun-Rays.org site, tested
with SRSS3.x, maybe 4.x):
http://wiki.sun-rays.org/index.php/SRSS_Addon:_FLButselector
For XDMCP there is a "native" switcher during non-kiosk
logins.
Alternatively, on some Linux systems you can install the
SRSS and programmatically "utswitch" the DTU's session
from your current SRSS to a specified SRSS server.
- Are there any other things I should know before I try to pull this
off? :)
SRSS tends to work better under Solaris 10, and is picky
about the software environment - see compatibility lists
in the docs. You can install it in VM (VMWare, VirtualBox)
so as to not dedicate hardware for "protocol-translation"
you'd need to connect your DTU to your end-servers.
Beside that, you might want to review Oracle's current
legalese regarding the home-use of Solaris and SRSS.
Maybe you do have a right to be a developer, POC or such
and use the software for long time without purchasing.
As far as I know, the catch is that, legally, you must
have purchased not only the DTU hardware, but also the
RTU (Right-to-use) license and the server software.
In the older times you might get away with downloading
trial versions of SRSS and even current patches from
Sun's site; now Oracle would hunt you down, maybe ;)
Good luck,
//Jim
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