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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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