Somewhere out there!

I haven’t posted much recently as we’ve been busy with the sale of our house and the hunt for our new house. Our new home will be 600m from work, 500m from a nice park, swimming pool and gym, and 300m from the Onehunga cafe area. Even though I usually work from home, being able to walk down to grab some paperwork is going to be much nicer than having to drive for 25 minutes.
Yesterday, I got a good deal on an old Sun Ray 1 via Trademe. I’ll be doing some testing with these in the next couple months and will be comparing SRSS with NX.

From Thick clients: Betting against the network?, an article from Computerworld: Sun CIO juggles tight budgets, IT integration. This comment particularly was interesting:

(Bill) Vass (of Sun) expects to spend about $300 million this year on Sun’s IT needs, a figure that represents about 2% of the company’s expected revenue this year. The average company spends between 3% and 4% of its revenue, most figures show — and most of Sun’s direct competitors spend far more.

I’ve been using nxat to redirect ALT-TAB when running the NX Client on Windows. However the latest 1.5 client broke nxat. Today another developer, Srini, has released nxutility which does work with the 1.5 client and is even better than nxat as it runs in the systray. Good job!

On Friday my NX desktop started playing up a little. So I rebooted. Kernel root VFS mount error! Very nice. After some testing, it was the first time I’d seen a faulty HDD bring down the Linux kernel even when booting from a Live CD rescue disk. Damn!

Luckily, I was using NFS home directories and avoided “where is that month old backup” mode.

Back in June I decided I’d try out NX and my MiniMac as a possible active working desktop solution. The genesis for this was mainly based on my decision back in March that iBooks were the best portable solution. Reasonable battery live, hardware/software combination that just works, together.

One of my goals with NX and Xen is to achieve Thin Guy‘s level of desktop support. Zero!

Sun Ray = Office Supplies. You can’t “Fix” a Sun Ray. Out of the 33,000 Sun Ray desktops inside of Sun, how many “desktop” techs do you think are required to manage that install base? How does the number zero grab you? On the ultra rare occasion that something happens to your Sun Ray (let’s say a power supply failure), you replace it and send it back for a warranty replacement (5 years on the SR1g). In the meantime you walk to the closet, grab a spare and plug it in and pick up exactly where you left off. Anyone who can replace staples in a stapler or replenish their supply of post-it notes can replace a Sun Ray

I happened to have two IBM WinXP laptops on my desktop tonight as I was installing the NX client on one of these machine before my brother goes to China at the end of the week.

Anyway, I had a remote NX desktop running on his machine to my colo Xen machine about 256kbps (50ms) DSL away and on mine I had the local NX desktop which I’ve been using as a test install for the past two weeks. Compression was set at modem speeds for the remote and LAN speeds for the local desktops. I decided I need a test to show off NX off to him and figured a quick look at my gallery would be good. And it was. It surprised even myself.

The remote desktop loaded this page faster than the local desktop. There was a definitely noticeable difference in page display speed in Firefox. The quality of the remote desktop on the two screens was hardily different. The thumbnails on the remote were slightly blurry, but not by much.

The remote machine is sitting next (Xen-wise) to the gallery web server and obviously my local desktop load the thumbnails over the DSL link. So this is a certain testament to NX’s performance given that same page and images were rendered and presented faster from the remote location.