zpool.org » sunray http://zpool.org storage for my thoughts Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:33:59 +0000 en hourly 1 Integrating Snow Leopard Server with Unix LDAP and NFS http://zpool.org/2011/01/14/integrating-snow-leopard-server-with-unix-ldap-and-nfs http://zpool.org/2011/01/14/integrating-snow-leopard-server-with-unix-ldap-and-nfs#comments Sat, 15 Jan 2011 04:19:23 +0000 pds http://zpool.org/?p=86 I recently purchased a pair of Apple Xserve boxes for a project at work, with the goal of providing a functional Mac OS X desktop environment via our existing Sun Ray thin-clients. These two systems will be setup using Aqua Connect aka ACTS in a load-balanced, Windows Terminal Server like fashion.

In order to make this production worthy, it needs to integrate well with my existing LDAP and NFS environment. Snow Leopard Server comes with its own built-in Open Directory based on OpenLDAP, but my LDAP instances are based on OpenDS. In researching what would be necessary to make SLS talk to OpenDS, I came across Brent Kearney’s excellent Integrating Leopard Server With UNIX LDAP blog posts. His work is similar to a post by Rajeev Karamchedu that covers this for Tiger. In both cases they are using Sun’s Directory Server product which is similar to but different than OpenDS.

Suffice it to say that I’m not going to reproduce Brent’s work but I will document changes that I’ve had to make in order to make it work on Snow Leopard. The first of such changes was converting the apple.schema file to something that OpenDS would be happy with. This was accomplished by using Ludovic Poitou’s script for converting OpenLDAP schemas to OpenDS LDIF format. The resulting file still had a few errors that needed to be manually corrected but they were trivial. A working version of the file can be downloaded here. Note that the original apple.schema relies on some parts of the Samba schema. I modified mine to use 50-samba.ldif which came from the OpenDS wiki.

With these two extended schema files in place, all of the special Apple LDAP attributes are now available to me. The files should also work with OpenDJ which I plan on migrating to in the near future.

]]> http://zpool.org/2011/01/14/integrating-snow-leopard-server-with-unix-ldap-and-nfs/feed 1 Flash 10 on Sun Ray http://zpool.org/2008/12/12/flash-10-on-sun-ray http://zpool.org/2008/12/12/flash-10-on-sun-ray#comments Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:44:10 +0000 pds http://zpool.org/?p=22 Once again I’m revisiting the state of Flash support running under Sun Ray software. My previous post showed there had been improvements made on this front. How are things doing over a year later?

My Sun Ray environment today is using Ubuntu Hardy and Flash 10 from the included flashplugin-nonfree package. I’m still using PulseAudio with a workaround by Sebastian Hesselbarth that nicely configures pulseaudio for each user and redirects sound through the appropriate $UTAUDIODEV device. No more libflashsupport dependency. With this in place, users launch the Sound configuration in GNOME and set all options to “PulseAudio Sound Server”, and it just works.

Unfortunately the smurfing effect has returned in Flash 10, having been temporarily fixed at one point in a Flash 9 beta. Someone filed a bug with Adobe recently about this, and it appears it is being investigated. Hopefully Adobe can fix this soon!

]]> http://zpool.org/2008/12/12/flash-10-on-sun-ray/feed 0 Flash 9 on Sun Ray followup http://zpool.org/2007/10/26/flash-9-on-sun-ray-followup http://zpool.org/2007/10/26/flash-9-on-sun-ray-followup#comments Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:37:11 +0000 pds http://zpool.org/2007/10/26/flash-9-on-sun-ray-followup/ There have been some improvements on this front since my last post. Adobe’s pre-release flash player 9 update has the smurf effect color problem fixed, and Tobias Oetiker has made a libflashsupport patch that uses the $AUDIODEV environment variable. I have tested both of these on Ubuntu Feisty and Gibon and everything works as it should. My thanks to Adobe and Tobias for making the load averages on my Sun Ray servers increase.

]]> http://zpool.org/2007/10/26/flash-9-on-sun-ray-followup/feed 2 Getting Flash 9 with sound on a Sun Ray http://zpool.org/2007/03/11/getting-flash-9-with-sound-on-a-sun-ray http://zpool.org/2007/03/11/getting-flash-9-with-sound-on-a-sun-ray#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2007 04:52:16 +0000 pds http://usesolaris.org/2007/03/11/getting-flash-9-with-sound-on-a-sun-ray/ I have a deployment of approximately 40 Sun Rays at work that serve as the primary desktops for our scientists. Currently these Sun Rays are powered by Sun servers running Debian Linux, although I intend to migrate over to Nexenta once key pieces of the desktop catch up. One key piece of software is the Adobe Flash player, which sits at version 7 for Solaris, and has just been upgraded to 9 on Linux. This means that all the websites which now require the latest version of Flash are once again accessible to my users. Unfortunately, Adobe has seen fit to only support ALSA, something that the Sun Ray audio library doesn’t support. Flash without audio support is kind of pointless, so I went looking for a solution.

I stumbled across PulseAudio which provides a modified version of Adobe’s libflashsupport library, enabling you to use ESD or PulseAudio. I am using ESD as an audio “bridge” for all applications that don’t honor $AUDIODEV by default, which include those based on gstreamer. By setting FLASH_FORCE_ESD=1 before launching firefox, I am getting sound in Flash on my Sun Rays. Now that sound is working, the only remaining Flash issue is what we call the smurf effect. This is a bug in Flash that needs to be addressed directly by Adobe.

I look forward to the day when Adobe recognizes [Open]Solaris as a viable desktop OS and releases an up-to-date version of Flash.

Edit: It looks like they have released a beta!

]]> http://zpool.org/2007/03/11/getting-flash-9-with-sound-on-a-sun-ray/feed 0