On 1/31/07, Thierry Delaitre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm quite interested in having a sunray failover group composed of Linux and Solaris machines. The rationale for this is that some software are better supported on Linux and some other commercial software are only available on Solaris. I recall there were some interoperability issues with gnome on Solaris and Linux which had the bad effect of screwing up your gnome files if the users home directory was shared by both servers. I believe this has now been addressed in JDS R3 ?
Cross-platform and cross-release compatibility in Gnome config files is better than it used to be but unless you run a very recent Gnome everywhere there will still be issues. And there are definitely issues with individual applications. This isn't a Linux-vs-Solaris or a SPARC-vs-x86 problem, the problem has many more dimensions than those two. (The worst damage I ever did to my own Gnome configuration was caused by running Gnome sessions concurrently on RHAS3 and SLES8.) But these issues are all external to Sun Ray. If you're willing to take them on (or "inflict them on your users") then SRSS doesn't mind. The reason why SRSS does not support a mix of Solaris and Linux in the same group is because of the feature disparity inside SRSS across those platforms. For instance, SRSS does not provide CAM or NSCM on Linux, and it only recently (in 3.1.1) got support for USB mass storage on Linux. Until that gap gets closed we aren't willing to try to explain and support mixed Solaris/Linux groups at customer sites. Technically it works (or at least it did the last time I tried it, and we won't intentionally do anything to break it, we want it to keep on working), it's just not supported.
However, how can a user choose which server he wants to login to. ie Linux or Solaris (without having to use utselect/utswitch).
utselect/utswitch is the only supported mechanism for moving a session to an explicit destination server under user control. If your users will need to choose a different server each time they log in then there's no alternative, at least not inside SRSS. Some customers have written their own local version of a utselect GUI that does extra work appropriate for their needs. You could do that if utselect falls short for you. If a given user will generally want to always get a session on a particular OS (Fred almost always wants Linux, Judy almost always wants Solaris) then you could put the Linux machines into one group, put the Solaris machines into another and then use the AMGH feature (Multi-Group Hotdesking, where the A stands for Advanced or Automatic depending on who you ask) to send Fred to the Linux group and Judy to the Solaris group without them needing to see 'utselect' at all. if they occasionally need to have a session in the other group then they'll need to use utselect'utswitch (or some local wrapper) to get there, and back.
Is this feature going to be provided natively in future SunRay software releases ?
I'm not sure what this feature would look like. The whole notion of a Sun Ray host group (aka "failover group") is that it doesn't matter which machine provides the user's desktop. If that's not true then the machines don't belong in a group. Can you give an example of how you would want this feature to behave? OttoM. __ ottomeister Disclaimer: These are my opinions. I do not speak for my employer. _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
