i am now part of the great family of sun ray bloggers aggregated in planet sunray-users. there you can find a lot of very valuable information regarding the desktop products of sun microsystems. included in the list of authors are famous names like bob doolittle, the thinguy, brad lackey, pearley mears and the fat bloke. as i can see i am the only non-sun employee in this sun ray bunch. 
you can expect more to come…
just a short update, as i have no time to write as much as i want to… i’ve been asked to join the authors of the okithx blog. so read my non-tech nonsense over there. 
you have forgotten the password to the sun ray administrator interface? don't worry, this is a quick guide to retrieve it using some simple shell commands. the key to success is the file /etc/opt/SUNWut/utadmin.pw - it contains an ascii string which is the administrator password.
what, plain text passwords, you may ask? of course not... the string is "cyphered" by the rot13 algorithm. so you can get back the password by decrypting the mentioned string it with a rot13 tool.
you can do this on the web using this or this online tool or offline using the following bash script:
after retrieving the original password you can use it further or change it using the /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utpw command. it changes both passwords in the sun ray data store (srds) and the local file /etc/opt/SUNWut/utadmin.pw
good luck!
i just stumbled upon the hudf. this is really awesome. you need to take a look at the bigger version of it - and read the explanations!
as promised here comes part two of the usb scripts for sun ray ultrathin-clients. this is yet simpler but fancier than the mount script because it uses zenity to display the result of the unmounting operation.
so this is what you should get after executing the script:
of course there is an appropriate dialog if something fails.
by the way i have recognized that the scripts do work only if executed in a terminal. to make sure that it is run in a terminal use the checkbox in the starters' preferences dialog. to be true i don't know why this is necessary.
please let me know if you find some errors while using this script. i'ld love to know if it helps you in your sun ray environment. leaving a comment would be nice. thanks!
by the way, the odf plugin for ms office i referred to a few days ago is available for download. quoting the mentioned site:
The StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview, a plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 that allows users of Microsoft Word 2003 to read, edit and save import to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is now available.
[..]
This initial plug-in application will support the conversion of text documents (.doc/.odt) only and full support of spreadsheet and presentation documents will be available in the final version, expected in April. The converter is easy to setup and use, the conversion happens transparently and the additional memory footprint is minimal. Microsoft Word users now can have seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Word's documents to and from ODF.
download the plugin for free and smash the office monopoly! (hey, that rhimes)
as you all know the sun ray ultrathin-clients support several types of devices connected to them, including serial and parallel devices, usb mass storage, pdas and so on. for a full list see the sun ray admin guide, chapter four. now when a usb mass storage device gets plugged in, the sun ray services mount it to /tmp/SUNWut/mnt/[username]/disk[integer]/. the user then needs to traverse the file system to get into the named directory which is applicable but quite a strange behavior for people who got used to windows (plug in usb-stick and it gets mounted as a lokal partition, then the user gets notified of it). because of this i have thought of a possibility to decrease user concerns and increase their positive experiences. yesterday i did a quick hack to check for mounted usb devices, link them to the users home directory and open a file browser to display the linked directory.
the script has a pitfall yet, because it supports only one usb device per user. so if the user connects two or more usb mass storage devices (should happen rarely) the scripts fails. i plan to code an option the select the desired device. perhaps some of my fellow readers want to supply this so i don't have to code it?
btw. using this script you have to unmount devices after usage of course. i will come up with the according script later.
how do we define the web and ourselves using it? professor michael wesch of kansas state university tries to visualize the ideas and concepts of web 2.0 in a very well done video. while the message itself does not suprise me that much it is the video transcription that impresses me.
the blog of ksu's digital ethnography provides more information and collects responses to the video. and there a lot responses as we all live web 2.0.
hah, how great is that?! according to a press release sun just announced the release of an opendocument (odf) plugin for microsoft word based on staroffice or openoffice respectively in a few days. odf-plugins for all other microsoft office programs are expected to be released in april 2007.
thanks to erwin for pointing this out.
hey ya, fellow sysadmins.
i started playing around with the open-source network backup software bacula on a sun fire v240 and a sun storedge lto 2v tape drive, which is actually a hp ultrium 448 drive rebranded by sun. i haven't seen the application in action yet, because i'm currently lost in configuration. what really stunnes me is the huge amount of well-written documentation - quite unusual for open-source products. huge kudos to the bacula-crew for that!
i'll keep you updated if the app itself turns out to be as good as its documentation.
