[ILUG] Sun and the sunray thingy

[Stephen_Reilly at dell.com]

I came across a similar, though not as cool, sort of a thing during the
summer last year. Don't know the intricate details of it but you could
actually use any card at all as your swipe card. You can set your password
to be your credit/bank card. Nice systems.

--steve


		-----Original Message-----
		From:	Caolan McNamara [mailto:Caolan.McNamara at ul.ie]
		Sent:	Wednesday, October 13, 1999 2:37 PM
		To:	ilug at linux.ie
		Subject:	[ILUG] Sun and the sunray thingy

		I was up at Sun yesterday and had a gawk at their sunray
thingy, very nice I 
		have to say. One big server elsewhere and each local machine
is just a monitor
		and a sunray box, no local harddrives or fan or moving
parts, so completely
		silent. about 10x10 inches and 2 deep. Couple of usb ports
hanging out of the 
		back of the box, monitor keyboard and power cables, all
resources are remote. 
		Each users gets a card and they can use that to bypassing
logging in and out, 
		stick in the card and "twap" up comes your session exactly
as it was when you 
		pulled out the card, pull out the card and wander over to
another machine and 
		stick it in, and again"twap" up it comes. Very sweet. 

		I originally thought that the card was just sending a
session close downrequest
		to all the apps, and that they were saving their state, you
know the thing you
		can do with gnome and kde and other apps which save their
location on screen,
		and optionally save their state so that they can start up
again and put 
		themselves in as close a state as they were when they were
shut down, but on
		closer examination this wasnt the case at all, i got
suspicious when I noted
		that an ordinary spread of apps were managing to remember
their entire state,
		down to what menu entry you highlighted, etc etc. In fact
the session remains 
		running all the time (if you just put in and pull out the
card), so for instance
		if you have netscape downloading a file, twap the card out
and come back 
		tomorrow, stick in the card into a completely different
machine if you so
		desire, and ta-da the session has remained open for the
duration and netscape 
		is still running. Very cool. 

		There was a catch though, each server machine hosts about
20-30 clients, and
		if you twap your card into a client attached to a different
server then you
		dont get the original desktop which is running happily away
on the first server,
		and utterly disconnected from the second server.

		What I'd like to figure out is what trick is sun doing here,
does each user
		get a virtual XServer on the main server (xvfb sort of
thing), which is 
		then piped down to the sunray which sticks it onto the
monitor. Or is there
		some magic trick where all the X apps are reparented from
one display (the
		virtual one) to another (the sunray one). Like what the hell
? Anyone in Sun
		gonna let me in on the mechanics here, maybe its a lot
easier than ive been
		thinking.

		Anyways I thought it was pretty cool, Id also like to know
what sort of stuff
		is actually inside the sunray box, some standard sparc
processor ? etc etc,
		could linux every run on such equipment etc, or is the box
basically dumb which
		is what I imagine. Who controls any usb devices that get
plugged into the box ?
		and so on...

		C.

		Real Life: Caolan McNamara           *  Doing: MSc in HCI
		Work: Caolan.McNamara at ul.ie          *  Phone:
+353-86-8790257
		URL: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan    *  Sig: an oblique
strategy
		Don't be frightened of cliches

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