Hey, look out! this is an addendum to yesterday's post on setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10 . all of this is written with the assumption you've followed the setup steps in that post already. I hadn't realised just how much of a pain not having (non-smartcard-based) mobile sessions is, especially given I use the virtual clients a non-trivial amount. so let's fix that on the…
time for another Sun Ray blog post! I've had a few people email me asking for help setting up a Sun Ray server over the last few months, and despite my attempts to help them get it going there's been mixed results with running SRSS on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10. my Sun Ray server is still on an earlier OI snapshot, so I figured it was about time to try to actually follow the new guides myself.…
among my many other incredibly autistic hobbies, I have been known to enjoy toying with telephony solutions - usually software-based ones. I wanted to get a physical PBX to play with, though, partly as a way to hook up some modems, and partly just because I like having blinkenlights in my home server rack. I ended up getting an Avaya IP Office IP500v2 control unit for dirt cheap, with a System SD…
NOTE: We are one of the developers of PluralKit , and this post is written with that perspective - but this is our own opinion, not that of PluralKit as a project, nor that of our employers. This post is a bit sweary. This isn't a post I wanted to be writing. After the recent announcements of both Simply Plural and Octocon shutting down; and developers of other plural-focused applications (like…
so, SvelteKit . it's a pretty nice web framework! a lot of the frontend web stuff we've been doing for the last while has been SvelteKit apps, and we've come to like it quite a bit. i knew it supported pre-rendering static content with adapter-static , but what i didn't know is that it also lets you turn off client-side JS rendering entirely, making it into what is effectively an overly-complex…
I am one of those people who will only-semi-ironically say "20XX is the year of the Linux desktop!" on a regular basis. I use NixOS on most of my computers, including my company-issued ones - I'm very thankful that my boss has just as much disdain for Windows as I do. at work, we use Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager quite heavily for accessing both internal, and customer, servers. it's generally…
NOTE: tl;dr: for OpenIndiana 2025.10 (and above), have a look at our updated install guide! yesterday (October 28, 2025), the OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10 snapshot was released. scrolling through the "Notable changes" list, I saw something fun: SunRay Maintenance work and improvements. (It’s still a popular way to run Desktops for Families) looking at the Git diff of the Sun Ray page of the…
I picked up a HPE/Nimble CS1000 array for the low low price of free a while back, and it's sat in storage since. about time I did something with it! these are rebranded SuperMicro "SuperStorage" SSG-6048R-DE2CR24L units - featuring two compute nodes ( X10DRS-4U - each with two LGA2011 R3 sockets + 8 DIMM slots), and a 24-bay 3.5" SAS backplane (where both compute nodes have access to all drives at…
welp. in the last installment of the Sun Ray saga , i mentioned the difficulty in finding newer firmware releases for these wonderful little guys. tl;dr: Sun Ray Server Software 5.3 onwards stopped shipping the device firmware, requiring a separate download - except the firmware downloads were locked behind an Oracle support contract. a few people told me "you'd really not be gaining much by using…
the orange creamsicle is named Soup. he's a goofball. the tuxedo girl is named Remi. she's a year younger than Soup, but much larger - and much more intelligent (not hard, given Soup is orange).
i've used thin clients at home for quite a while - both for their intended use (remotely accessing a desktop of another system); and in the sense of "modern thin clients are x86 boxes that are wildly overpowered for what they run, so they make good mini servers." recently, i saw a bulk lot of Sun Ray thin clients pop up on Trade Me (NZ's eBay-like auction site) - and with very little idea of how…
i tend to like using Libreboot on the computers of mine that support it - which is many of them, because i have far too many ThinkPads. while setting up Libreboot on a ThinkPad T420, i ran into a SeaBIOS bug - the AHCI initialization code had been recently updated, and it seemed to have broken things... <irys> ooh this is fun. seabios commit 8863cbbd15a73b03153553c562f5b1fb939ad4d7 (ahci: add…
recently, on a trip to the local computer recyclers, i saw they had some Citrix-branded rack-mount servers. i was looking out for little applicance-like rack-mount gear, but wasn't sure what these were , so i popped the lid of one of them off, only to be greeted with a Supermicro logo! without looking at them too much, i figured they'd be Atoms of some description. a quick search for the…
someone in a discord server i'm in asked the question "how do you tell windows versions apart by looking at them?" - and thus, i had to put this together. this is not meant to be exhaustive (i'm not even going to try documenting betas...), and doesn't include server editions, but. here you go, nonetheless. release-by-release let's start at the top - by which i mean, the bottom, because windows 11…
cohost will become read-only on Tuesday, October 1st. At this time, we will make best-effort attempts to keep the servers online through the end of 2024. — "cohost to shut down at end of 2024" , from the staff blog (archive.org link) damn. i was using cohost a fair bit, even if only as a read-only "i enjoy looking at these people's posts!" thing. i guess that means i need to post the things i'm…
trying to do that whole "blogging" thing again. i don't know how this will go, but we'll see in due course.