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 They used to be used extensively on desktops but have been replaced by PCs over the past 10 years and are now mainly used in a few small areas where only access to our character based ERP is needed.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.
The Sun Ray software setup was pretty straight forward, although setting up all the required DHCP options can be a pain. Once all was good I set about upgrading the firmware on the 2FS clients. The newer firmware adds a popup menu options on the client which allows you to enter a server address manually, along with some other goodies such as VPN support. With the new firmware you don’t need to worry about DHCP options for locating a Sun Ray server, you can just enter the address manually.
I then setup a cut down desktop with only Gnome Terminal available, worked some magic with .Xresources to enable correct operation of the Function keys in our ERP (F11 and F12 on a Sun keyboard are actually SunF35 and SunF36!) and grabbed some users to test it out. They were impressed straight away with the readability of the screen compared to a Wyse. The next day a Wyse failed in the warehouse and needed replacing so we decided to throw the Sun Ray in at the deep end! I got SXCE installed (with just the same ease as on my laptop) on a spare Dell PC, threw in an extra gig of memory and setup the Sun Ray server software. I simply ran the server software in shared network mode so when the Sun Ray booted up on the main LAN, it just found the server with a broadcast request.
It’s been in place now for a little over a week and we’ve had no calls logged to the Helpdesk with any issues at all. It’s used for around 18 hours a day by in a warehouse environment so the fact there are no moving parts is a big plus. All in all I am very impressed with both the Sun Rays and Solaris Express, in fact, SXCE may well hang around on my laptop for a while longer.
