I’ve always had an interest in the weather, it’s the one thing in Ireland that can make or break your day. As the say goes, “You don’t go to Ireland for the weather”! Anyway, I decided to go out and buy myself a weather station. I didn’t fancy spending €600 or €700 on something like a Davis Vantage Pro as I wasn’t even sure I had a suitable location for the station itself. I decided to try out a La Crosse WS-2308.

I setup Open2300 on my Sun Blade running Ubuntu and connected the console of the 2308 via serial. After a bit of messing about with the positioning of the sensors, the main unit and temperature sensor was receiving direct sunlight in the late afternoon and the wind sensor seemed and still is a bit too sheltered, everything was working pretty well.

I’m using mysql2300 to upload the values to a database and I wrote a few PHP scripts to generated some graphs using JpGraph. You can see the results of my efforts here.

We’ve been working our way through our stash of Wyse 60 terminals in work over the last few years. They used to be used extensively on desktops but have been replaced by PCs over the past 10 years and are now mainly used in a few small areas where only access to our character based ERP is needed. As one would fail we’d just pull one retired from a desk out of storage and replaced the failed unit.

Well, we finally have run out of spares so we decided to trial run some Sun Rays in their place. I picked up 2 refurbished Sun Ray 2FS systems from our Sun dealer and set about getting the things up and running. I decided to setup a small test network with my laptop running the Sun Ray software either under Linux or Solaris, we had a spare SunFire 280R but it was due to go live in about two weeks and didn’t feel like having to rebuild it after I was done testing. I was running Gentoo on my laptop at the time (I switch distros on my laptop wayyy too often) and had a feeling the Sun Ray software wasn’t going to play nice so I decided I’d give Solaris a try.

I grabbed a copy of Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) and set about installing it. To put it quite simply, I was amazed, apart from the usual clunky Solaris installer, everything worked perfectly. I’m used to having to install drivers for wireless and graphics with most Linux distros, but SXCE included everything. Now this may be down to Sun being able to ship binary drivers as part of the standard build, but it still impressed me. The only things that weren’t working were the volume buttons and my fingerprint reader, both of which can be enabled just as easily as in Linux. After playing around for a few hours, even getting Compiz up and running I set about getting the Sun Ray clients setup.

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